Re: Vowel length near-minimal pairs in Tirelat

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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