Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

On 24 Jun 2004 Andreas Johansson <andjo@FR..> wrote:

> >   I think it is about the meaning of markedness.
> ?
> How did markedness enter the picture?
  You wrote "since that's what's being explicitly indicated", that
is >>what's being orthographically marked<< in my recognition.
According to this argumentation, orthographical markedness would
mean the primary phological distinction. I am not sure about the
validity of this syllogism.

> What gives you that impression? From what I've read, we originally
> had a four-way distinction VC - V:C - VC: - V:C:
  Does this "we" refer to the Swedish or to the common ancestor of
the Northern Germanic languages? Do you know what was the actual
situation in the time of the adoptation of the Latin spelling? And
what about the closely related Danish? (I really would like to know
these answers in order I could see the problem more clearly.)

> All I know of the subject suggests that consonant length was around
> when the orthographical conventions in question were adopted.
  Do you know the source of the adopted orthographical conventions?
I mean that Hungarian orthography did not indicate the vowel length
for a long period because our source was German (actually Bavarian
chuch traditions), which, as far I know, did not know consonant
length that time, therefore they used consonant doubling as a vowel
length marker.

  And I recall -- maybe I am wrong -- that all this problem arose
from the common(?) Germanic development, that every long vowels
were shortened in closed syllables and every (stressed) short
vowels were lengthened in open ones. That is why the marking of the
open-closed state of the syllables can be re-interpreted as the
marking of the vowel length. This solution was facilated by the
fact that Latin orthography does not indicate vowel length, and the
first non-Latin "orthographers" simply applied Latin rules to their
native language.
  From this point of view, Swedish true long consonants seems to be
secondary even if it was already developed in the time of the
adoption of the Latin orthography.

> Nice. Every German I've heard use the word pronounces it [k@Ud]
  I have run a simple Google query. On the domain .de in pages
written in German, I got 121 hits for "ASCII-Kode" and 29,400 hits
for "ASCII-Code". Therefore it seems to me that you have to talk
with 244 people to find one who writes (and possibly pronounces)
[ko:d@].

  Moreover, AFAIK diphtongues like [@U] do not exist in German, if
they pronounce [k@Ud], they do not use a borrowing, the use simply
a pure English word. In this stage, we cannot analyse the situation
further, because the speakers you heard refused the existence of
bothe German lexeme "Code" [ko:t] and "Kode" [ko:d@]. If we switch
back to our starting point, in a similar situation, Rokokas
speakers would pronounce [wilwil] for Tok Pisin "wilwil" despite
their native phototactics, no matter how it is written "officially"
in Rotokas texts. Thus we cannot say anything about the spelling
"wiliwili".

  It is possible that "Kode" comes from othologists who want it to
be written as "Kode" and pronounced as [ko:d@]*. However, this
effort seems not to be accepted by the majority of speakers (yet?).
This is why this kind of spelling and pronunciation is rare. But I
think Rotokas orthologists form a set with zero elements.

  * I have no German a_tergo wordlist, but I wonder what frequency
has the word ending /-o:d/ > [-o:t]. Does anybody have data about
this? I feel that it is much more rare than /-o:d@/. This can be an
argument of an orthologue form "Kode" [ko:d@]. (But it is only a
supposition from me.)

> My Duden, however, gives [ko:t] as the only pronunciation.
  I looked up the headword "Kode" (and not "Code"), and you?
However, maybe fugiunt tempora, fugiunt mores :))

> [ko:d@] is clearly a spelling pronunciation. And [ko:t], spelt
> "Kode", still represents a partial adaptation; it's not kept in the
> English form _code_, nor is it fully assimilated to *_Kod_.
  I don not see the partial adaptation, I see only a small
confusion of two different lexemes "Kode" [ko:d@] and "Code" [ko:t]
plus their unadapted from "Code" [k@Ud]. You did not show evedences
of individuals who write "Kode" and pronounces [ko:t] or [k@Ud]: it
would be the only test of the partial adaptation. I proved in my
previous posting that it is possible the pronounce a word in your
idiolect even if it is written in the form of another idiolect (we
have even a number of endogenous [and not adapted] examples of this
in Hungarian).

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