fact hark back to the original historical form, and infinitival kvna may be the changed one. The form mvra 'to hear' has grammaticalized into an evidential suffix -mush 'hearsay'. Ex. hauanchi isin wuru: yamanaiamalim ma:maia-mushun-de: 'They say that in this land many men died'. There are several other evidential suffixes, differentiating sensory mode (hearing, sight, etc.) as well as time. mvra also finds modal use in the clitic space that often follows the first substantive in the sentence: kvnjin MUSH yamana:mu:ta, kvndaian-da:gia kv-teki-sin-de: kvnjima hauanchi moala 'He MUST be alive, because they (the ones who told me about it) saw him today'. There are other modal verbs also found in this space. There is little or no reduplication evident on the Yahgan verb, and sound symbolism of the augmentative/diminutive type appears to be largely lexicalized. On the other hand, Yahgan exhibits a good deal of remnant sound symbolism in the verb, similar to what one sees in English. A good number of verbs seem to form small 'word families' which have slight semantic differences which may have been encoded using sound symbolism (as one often sees, for instance, in some languages of the Austroasiatic stock). For instance haina 'go, walk lightly' versus u:unna 'walk heavily, plod'. In such cases the original symmetry of form seems often to have been distorted by historical changes. Alphabet The alphabet currently sanctioned officially in Chile is as follows: a, æ, ch, e, ö, f, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, rh, s, š, t, u, w, x. A simplified orthography is a variant of the old Bridges system, created for online use on the Waata Chis discussion list on Yahoo Groups and elsewhere. It has tense and lax vowels as well as voiced and voiceless consonants. In the system, tenseness is marked by colon (:) following the vowel sign: a, a:, ai, au, e, e:, i, i:, iu:, o, o:, oi, u, u:, v (pronounced as a schwa, not ), all corresponding to unique graphemes in the Bridges orthography. The consonants are b, d, ch, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, ng, p, r, s, sh, t, w, x, y, z, all corresponding to unique Bridges graphemes. Some are found only in restricted environments. The phonemes hm, hn, hl, hr, hw, and hy are used as well, and are digraphs in the earlier Bridges writings, but single graphemes