Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

On 18 Jun 2004 "Mark P. Line" <mark@...> wrote:

> What evidence do we have that [w] is used when pronouncing 'wiliwili'?
>
> I think we have to assume that it's written with 'w' in Rotokas because
> it's written with 'w' in Tok Pisin. We can make further assumptions about
> the most likely ways it'd be pronounced, but we've already covered that.
  I do not agree with you. Pro primo: it was only your supposition that
"wiliwili" is a Tok Pisin borrowing. It is not a strong argument to
back up a supposintion with another non-independent supposition.
Pro secundo: Let's suppose that it came from Tok Pisin and the writing
of "w" is retained. This means that foreign words are spelled in their
foreign orthography is Rotokas. However, if it is true why are there
plus syllabic i's in "wiliwili" as compared to Tok Pisin "wilwil"? I
think that it is a very unlikely situation that the orthography is
partly retained, partly domesticated in a single morpheme.
  I think that the only logical interpretation is that "wiliwili" is
written according to the actual Rotokas pronunciation and "w" denotes a
non-[v] sound (possibly [w] or [B]: the latter is part on the phonetic
inventory.)

> Only if you consider /x/ a phoneme of American English because some
> Americans use [x] when pronouncing forms like (Scottish) 'loch' or
> (German) 'Bach' (the composer).
  I would like to ask you not to use English examples. I am not
English, you are a native; I have no practice in the variety of
American English dialectology, you possibly have. Let us encounter on a
neutral battle field!

  As for your above opinion. Of course, when we study dialects spoken
by Amish or previously Pennsilfaanisch-speaking areas, it is
conceivable that [x] has a phonemic status. [I do not know whether is
it the sutation or not. I ask every Anglopones not to reflect to this
issue as it were in a thread about English dialects.]

  The difference is that American English has standard(s) while Rotokas
has not. I do not think that there is a language as Rotokas, there are
three different dialects that are grouped by some linguists under the
artificial term Rotokas. And we still do not know which dialects was
studied and published by who...

> Languages in contact are just not as cut-and-dried as some would have
> us suppose.
  I have real experiences in language contacts (1) I am bilingual, a
member of a minority ethnic group in Hungary; (2) I am not English,
therefore I live in an environment exposed to strong English influence
(as Rotokas is exposed to e.g. Tok Pisin).

  E.g. we in Hungarian use the English word "software" and we pronounce
it as [sof(t)ver], that is, sounds are replaced by their nearest
Hungarian equivalent. We write this word as "szoftver" or "software"
but never as *"softwer" or *"szoftvare", that is in a such way that
vowels and consonants are written according to different principles.
Moreover, we know the word "ischaemia" and it is pronounced az
[iSe:mia] or [iske:mia] and spelled as "isémia" or "ischaemia" but
never written as *"ischémia" or *"isaemia" or *"iskaemia", etc.

> That dataset is way too small to be able to claim there's no "ti".
> Also, we have to ask ourselves why the Firchows would never have
> mentioned such an obvious allophonic alternation. I don't think we can
> assume they "missed" it.
  Does anybody here on the list that what was exactly described by
Firchows under the name Rotokas? Did anybody read actually their work?
Do they describe e.g. the actual representations of /g/? I heard it to
be pronounced as both [g] and [G] in the sound examples found by Jean-
François Colson.

> Again, that dataset is way too small to really know how rare /g/ is.
> The Firchow 1969 phonology gave frequencies of all the phonemes in
> their corpus, IIRC. Have you looked there?
  I have not looked since it is unreachable for me. But probably you
could. In this phase of our debate the corpus found by Jean-François is
the largest one, since -- as I feel -- Firchows' corpus is not
available for anyone. They can be wrong in their conclusions too,
therefore I cannot accept them as oracles without controllable and more
detailed information about their work.

  Moreover, I do not ask for a phoneme frequency, I claim to a sound
(allophone) frequency. If Firchows omit [s] as a phoneme how could I
check its phonotactics on their phoneme list? Phonemes are
abstractions, they are already interpreted by somebody and possibly
they are misinterpreted in some degree.

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