Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ    Attic   

Re: Vowel length near-minimal pairs in Tirelat

From:ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
Date:Saturday, November 8, 2008, 6:14
Sorry for this bobble..............


>From: ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> >Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...> >To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu >Subject: Re: Vowel length near-minimal pairs in Tirelat >Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2008 00:05:41 -0500 > >Herman Miller wrote: > >(snip examples) >>So it looks like vowel length (and not stress) is distinctive. > >Yes, from that data. > >But >>there's a complication: an unwritten schwa sound in some words, which is >>always unstressed. E.g.: >> >>dbaxa /d@'baxa/ "to resist" (not /'d@baxa/) >>knagi /k@'nagi/ "brass" (not /'k@nagi/) >>tezn /'tEz@n/ "transparent plastic ball for gerbils" (not /tE'z@n/) >>zgaki /z@'gaki/ "similar" (not /'z@gaki/) > >That isn't phonemic, merely a phonetic/sub-phonemic transition sound in the >surface structure, to facilitate the cluster. In my favorite generative >terms, [@] would be a very late (maybe even the last) rule in the >derivation, surely _after_ stress has been assigned. Is penultimate stress >the rule? no problem in that case; or is it "stress the first (phonemic) >vowel of the word?" or maybe something else-- still no problem, since >whenever stress is assiged, [@] "isn't there yet" in phonological terms.