Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

Tamás Racskó said:
>
>   I do not know the reliability of the author(s) of the article
> "Rotokas alphabet" in Wikipedia
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_alphabet>, but it says that
> "[it consists] of only the eleven letters AEIKOPRSTUV [...] The S
> is sometimes written G, and the V is sometimes written B."
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.


> An example for the contradictory data: Herman Miller cited a
> Rotokas sentence on 15th June: "vi wiliwili vorepieriva". It is
> suprising because there are both word-initial "vi" and "wi".
> According to this "v" and "w" (the latter is possibly [B]) should
> be separate phonemes not just the allophones of the single phoneme
> /v/...

I'd say that "wiliwili" is a loan word from Tok Pisin 'wilwil'.

I'd guess that 'w' is realized as /B/ (and not as /u/) because of the
phonotactic adjustment.

No idea how monolinguals (if there are any today) pronounce the 'l'.


-- Mark