This also offers a clue to the demise of distinct feminine forms, for surely the feminine plural article was originally le but became homophonous with the masculine li. The abolition of le was surely one of Bernual’s reforms.

However this rises the question whether the plural indefinite article should be ni with an old feminine ne, and a prevocalic gn’ I think it’s possible unless neque becomes [nɪ], and I think it becomes nec! ‘Not’ also most likely does not become ne [nɪ] but no [nʊ], with ‘no’ being nó [no] or even nau.

The form eun can live on with the meaning ‘some’, with n’eu(n) meaning ‘not any’ as in Tu tin eun menit? — Nó jo no tien n’eu. “Have you got some coins? — No I haven’t got any”. Of course there will also be aocú — aocune — eochéu for ‘some’ in the sense where it can’t be replaced by ‘any’: Txi daift estre aocun’ explanaçáu!

/BP 8^)>

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When expanding the alphabet Ajchrip worked with what he had, viz. a set of Russian Cyrillic moveable type. He used several methods to expand his inventory of letters:

1. To use letters which were allographs for a single sound in the 19th century Russian alphabet for different phonemes in his native language.
2. To turn the letters which the missionaries had used for two different sounds upside down to get a new letter for the sound missing in Russian. This was easy to do in moveable type but is hard to reproduce on computers. In the case of Е е and Ǝ ə he used this method to distinguish two different sounds which were written alike in Russian. Apparently he had no Ё ё types available.
3. Digraphs, used especially to distinguish alveopalatal fricatives and affricates from their retroflex counterparts. The digraph НГ нг was taken over from the missionaries’ spelling, since it was in fact unambiguous. Note that in the modern language it contrasts with the spelling н’г in loanwords like дин’гі, which were formerly spelled in the Russian way (денги).
4. In one case, Ъ ъ, he used a letter which was always silent in Russian for a sound not found in that language. He had plenty of Ъ ъ type, since that letter was used vacuously after every word-final consonant in 19th century Russian orthography.

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