tongue. Notice another important feature of the vowel-altering rule. The vowel i is altered in front of many different consonants, not just t. Compare: prize price five fife jibe hype geiger biker Does this mean there are five different rules that alter i—one for z versus s, one for v versus f, and so on? Surely not. The change-triggering consonants t, s, f, p, and k all differ in the same way from their counterparts d, z, v, b, and g: they are unvoiced, whereas the counterparts are voiced. We need only one rule, then: change i whenever it appears before an unvoiced consonant.
