| Summary: | Although Tibeto-Burman has been reconstructed with a phonemic quantity distinction between vowels, e.g., TB *gar `leave, abandon' and *gar `dance, leap, stride' (Benedict 1972 #15 and #11), which probably indicates moraic light and heavy syllables, respectively, the Tibetan writing system is, at best, ambiguous concerning phonological quantity distinctions, even though the evidence seems to suggest morae in modern Lhasa Tibetan (Chang and Shefts 1965, Goldstein and Nornang 1978, Hari 1979, and Hogan 1994).
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