Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

Quoting Tamás Racskó <tracsko@...>:
> > 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.
Trouble is, in Swedish doubled consonsants _do_ mean phonemic geminates on this
analysis. (They're normally phonetically long.)

> 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.
Yep. In stressed syllables, a long vowel will be followed by a short consonant,
or no consonant, while a short vowel will be followed by a long consonant.
Analyzing both as phonemically distinguishing would amount to needless
multiplication of entities.

> 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.
OTOH, one might want to treat consonant length as primary, since that's what's
being explicitly indicated.

> > 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.
The other example that strikes me ATM is German _Kode_, also spelt _Code_, from
English _code_. This is however not exactly parallel to the Swedish case, since
while _webb_ is also phonetically adapted to Swedish norms, _Kode_ is, at least
by the intellectuals I hear it from, pronounced à la anglais.

                                                      Andreas