Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

"Mark P. Line" wrote:
> Any sequence of vowels is possible in Rotokas, including two of the same
> vowel. There's no justification for positing separate phonemes for long
> vowels (or diphthongs).
Do you know this, or are you guessing?  Just because sequences of vowels
are possible doesn't rule out consideration of long vowels.  For
example, stress rules may treat long vowels and diphthongs as single
units.  In Japanese, you can have more or less any sequence of vowels
(there are some restrictions in native words, namely, no monomorphemic
vowel+u), but it still makes sense to analyze a word like _okaasan_ as
/oka:san/ rather than /okaasan/ for several reasons.  One, pitch-accent
rules take note of both syllables and morae, the pitch-drop can only be
located on the first mora of a two-mora syllable.  That is, it's
assigned by syllable, and looks at okaasan as o-kaa-san.  It could well
be that there are such phonetic processes in Rotokas that justify
treating aa as /a:/.

> Orthographic 's' is a little suspicious in any event. The only
> phonological statements I've seen (by Skip Firchow) have given 6 consonant
> phonemes (not including /s/), but there are 7 consonant graphemes used to
> write the language (including 's', which only occurs before 'i'). I'll ask
> about that, too
I'd guess that [s] is an allophone of /t/ before /i/.  I haven't looked
at the data carefully, so I can't say if [ti] does occur, but if it
doesn't, then it's a pretty reasonable hypothesis.

 (I don't know if Skip is still around, but somebody at
> the Ukarumpa installation will be able to help.)
>
> -- Mark

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