schwa deletion rules

[Raimond Doctor]

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Dear Dr Hook,
                   I was a linguistic consultant at the Centre for
Development of Advanced Computing and in that capacity designed the first
spell-checker for Gujarati as well as the first online thesauri and
dictionaries.
At present I am on a sabbatical at the Collège de France in Paris and am
working on omputerisation of Indian scripts as well as data lemmatisation.
My grammar of Gujarati is scheduled to come out with Lincom, this summer.
              Simultaneously I am working on a computer-generated analysis
of Gujarati phonology which is based on my Gujarati corpus of around 2
million words. While the data-base itself is quite voluminous and will cover
a major part of the book, I have also a section on the Gujarati writing
system and the notion of the written syllable as well as a small section on
bridging rules permitting the user to move from the written to the oral. In
this area, the crucial factor is schwa deletion which is intimately tied up
with open-transition boundary markers. As far as I know, Dr Cardona has been
the first and probably the last to treat them in his book and the treatment
is quite summary, mainly because he did not have time to attack the problem.
              I have tried to solve the problem from the point of view of  a
statistical analysis and have devised rules which permit to explain the
problem of schwa deletion within the word. The rules are quite generic in
nature and seem to work for a majority of Indo-Aryan languages such as
Hindi, Marathi, Konkani and Oriya, languages with whose structure I am quite
familiar.
       I wonder if you have come across any treatment of this problem in any
literature dealing with Gujarati.
Hoping to read you and thanking you in advance,

Best regards,

R.Doctor

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