Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

On 17 Jun 2004 "Mark P. Line" <mark@PO...> wrote:

> I believe that Rotokas has a modern, phonologically engineered
> orthography and that such orthographies lack subphonemic distinctions (at
> least, I can't think of a single counterexample -- hence my question).
[...]

  If you are right when you said: "I'd say that "wiliwili" is a
loan word from Tok Pisin 'wilwil'", then "vi wiliwili vorepieriva"
is a counterexample, since Rotokas is said to have subphonemic
distinction between "v" [v] and "w" ~ "b" [B] ~ [w].

  However, if borrowings are not adapted to the phonemic rules of
Rotokas, that is the above orthography is not subphonemic then this
means that "v" and "w" are phonemic, though. Thus whe had more than
six consonant phonemes.

  (IMHO the term "orthography" excludes the fully phonological
engineering by the defintion: this is the difference between
orthography and transciption. Orthography is designed for non-
professional humans: it has confortable shortcuts for an average
speaker. An average speaker cannot distinguish even between letter
and sound, therefore, it cannot be expected that he/she could think
during writing in a "real-time way" in a more precise distinction
between sound and phoneme...)

> [Wikipedia] They don't give any sources, and there are 12 letters
> used to write _native_  Rotokas words (plus others used to write
> loan words). That makes this article pretty useless as a source.
  Sometimes authors' errors help us clear the hidden nature of
things better than their correct statements.

  I am still wondering whether Firchow's study covered all the
Rotokas dialects.

> I'd guess that 'w' is realized as /B/ (and not as /u/) because of
> the phonotactic adjustment.
  At least, Jean-François Colson gave a sample text that can be
analyzed. Thanks for this. Triplet "uia" and quadruplet "uiua" are
allowed, therefore there is no reason for treating w's of
"wiliwili" as underlying /u/'s.

  Jean-François's analysis reveals that (A) it is very likely that
grapheme "s" is subphonemic, the only syllable beginning with "s"
is "si" and it is moderately frequent. And there is no *"ti". (B)
Phoneme /g/ seems to be very rare, therefore we cannot make valid
statements of its phonotactic behaviour. My suggestion is still not
excluded: probable /gi/ is realized as [si] in addition to [si] <
/ti/. That is why there is a surplus letter "s": it could be a
merging of several allophones (and why should Rotokas writers be
bothered with orthographical distinction between these two [s]'s?)

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