Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Proto-Dravidian had a system of ten vowels consisting of five qualities ( i, e, a, o, u ), each with short and long counterparts. Some South Dravidian languages have expanded systems with innovative vowels that are described as centralized or retroflex. However, the phonetic nature of the vowels, and the list of languages that have them, remain poorly described. We present evidence that Muduga, a South Dravidian language of Kerala, is among the languages with expanded vowel systems. It has five innovative vowel qualities, three of which can be considered phonemic. Historical-comparative evidence indicates that the new qualities result from: (i) retraction of front vowels before retroflex consonants and alveolar /r/; and (ii) fronting of back vowels before alveolar and palatal consonants (except /r/ and /j/). Loss of conditioning consonants in some contexts has led to emergent contrasts. Acoustic phonetic analysis of two male speakers suggests that the new vowels are centralized along the front-back axis, but not retroflex or rhotacized. We compare these results to related developments in other South Dravidian languages and discuss correlations between retroflexion and retraction that motivate the observed patterns.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".