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Re: Vowel length near-minimal pairs in Tirelat

From:ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 20, 2008, 4:10
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.

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Herman Miller <hmiller@...>