bug with 'cl' as alias for 'clone'

I've been running the following aliases for a long time now:

alias g='git' # in bash

% cat ~/.gitconfig | grep clone
  cl = clone

This appears to still be calling the right UI command:

% g cl You must specify a repository to clone. ...

But when I try to actually clone a repository:

% ls rdbi
ls: rdbi: No such file or directory
% g cl http://github.com/erikh/rdbi.git
fatal: cannot set work tree after initialization
* ls -la rdbi/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x    2 raggi  staff    68 26 May 09:46 .
drwxr-xr-x  251 raggi  staff  8534 26 May 09:46 ..

So then, I try it with 'clone' instead of 'cl', and it works (after removing the dead initialized repo in ./rdbi):

* rm -rf rdbi/
% g clone http://github.com/erikh/rdbi.git
Initialized empty Git repository in ...

I could look into this later on when I'm not at $work, but as I have no knowledge of the UI internals, it'd be great if someone in the know could track this down.

Thanks in advance,

James