Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

On 22 Jun 2004 Andreas Johansson <andjo@FR..> wrote:

> Personally, I perceive a fairly basic difference 'tween, say, the systems of
> English and Swedish in this regard
  You are right, in word-final positions English and Swedish uses
the opposite extremities of the "general Germanic spelling". That
was why I used conditional tense because I did not remember the
exact Swedish usage in this field.

  However, due to the long historic co-existence, German is still
the typical Germanic for me (not the English), and German applies
the "Swedish method", cf. "Pik" 'peak; (to have an) edge (on
somebody)' vs. "pick!" 'pick!'. (And the present German spelling
reform extended this also to the final ss's and ß's.)

> For added trouble, there's a rival analysis of Swedish, on this
> list championed by BP, that holds that vocalic length in Swedish is
> allophonic, being triggered by consonant length
  Oh, these are the merits of my slang phrase "general Germanic
orthography", i.e. consonant doubling does not mean phonemic
geminates, it is rather a convention for coding vocalic length. In
this case, it is not significant that in some Germanic languages
(e.g. Swedish, German) word boundary is treated as [+vowel] and in
some other languages (e.g. English, Dutch) it is [-vowel] in terms
of orthography.

  However, I see from your explanation that vowel and consonant
length is somehow connected in Swedish. I think we can consider
both vocalic and consonantal length as primary (according to our
socialization and scientific bias), moreover it may vary from
subject to subject. Thus if we talk about the orthography, the
vowel length could be the primary since Swedish is part of the
Germanic cultural space.

> But if you did not mean to imply that partial orthographic adaption
> is unknown or next to unknown, we're not in disagreement.
  We are not in complete disagreement since I meant that we cannot
expect partial orthgraphic adatpation in case of a "regulated"
orthography. I am not convinced, though, that your Swedish example
is more general among the languages than my supposition. I would be
very interested in examples in other languages: French, Dutch,
Spanish etc.

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