Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

Mark P. Line wrote:
(Someone wrote:)
> > I seem to recall that that page mentioned that long vowels were
> > phonemic.
>
> It says there are 5 vowels in Rotokas, each of which occurs phonemically
> lengthened.
>
> There are a number of ways to interpret that claim. One way it *can't* be
> interpreted is that it posits 5 more vowel phonemes, because the same
> paper is very clear about the number of phonemes (5V, 6C) in the language,
> with minimal pairs provided.
Seems to me that in ordinary classical phonemics, there are just two ways to
state this:

1. there are phonemic long and short vowels, i.e., 10 vowels.  This seems to
be an unncessary multiplication of entities.

2. there are 5 phonemic vowels, and an abstract "length phoneme".  In that
case Rotokas technically has 12 phonemes.  As I recall, this is a solution
that would have been favored in Pikes "Phonemics", the book I cut my teeth
on in 1969, and which [at least at one time] was the approach favored by the
SIL.  I do believe that in the intervening 30+ years, SIL has adopted some
more up-to-date theoretical approaches :-))))

But OT3H-- Given what I've seen so far of Rotokas, and Mark Line's
statements, it appears most likely that Rotokas simply allows sequences of 2
like vowels which are phonetically long. So hypothetical [ka:] contrasts
with [ka], but these are /kaa/, /ka/.  There might even be ?*/kaaaa/, no?

Does the primary source say there are _phonemic_ long vowels?

Six of one....Given the apparent paucity of data, one might suspect that
perhaps the investigator him/herself had not come to a decision.

Fijian, Hawaiian  et al. (with (C)V structure) have "long vowels", which at
least in older sources are written with macrons-- but the general consensus
has usually been they are vowel _sequences_.

Some Philippine languages also have long vowels-- some arise due to
morphophonemics (certain prefixes/derivations lengthen vowels) but the
majority simply correlate with penultimate stress, so there are contrasts
like ?*['pa:nat] vs. ?*[pa'nat] (in Tagalog e.g. would be written |panat| --
|panát|).  That leads to six-of-one arguments as to whether length is the
relevant factor, or stress.

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