Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM said:
> Mark P. Line scripsit:
>
>> > Why not?  The standard romanization of many languages includes
>> > subphonemic distinctions.
>>
>> I can't think of any examples right now in modern, phonologically
>> engineered orthographies. Can you remind me of some?
>
> Petitio principii.  If I mention Hepburn Japanese, with its obviously
> sub-phonemic distinctions, you can retort that it's not modern and
> phonologically engineered enough.  Similarly, Samoan orthography is modern
> and
> phonological, but does not represent the ongoing merger of /t/ and /k/.

My original point was that I would expect the orthography of Rotokas to
lack subphonemic distinctions. In response to Nik's comment about the
widespread presence of such distinctions in "the standard romanization of
many languages", I implied (through my question) that I expect that lack
because I believe that Rotokas has a modern, phonologically engineered
orthography and that such orthographies lack subphonemic distinctions (at
least, I can't think of a single counterexample -- hence my question). I
continue to believe that such an expectation is valid.

In other words, the reason we can't think of any good counterexamples is
not because I've set up a petitio principii, but because we don't know of
any good counterexamples.

If somebody wants to argue that my expectation for Rotokas is invalid,
then I'd like to be shown why I should expect a modern, phonologically
engineered orthography to include subphonemic distinctions. I don't think
that Reverend Hepburn's 19th-century romanization (which was designed to
help non-native-speakers get the right allophones) or a 19th-century
orthography like Samoan (which, umm, failed to anticipate subsequent
phoneme mergers in the 20th & 21st centuries) need to make us expect
anything different about the orthography of Rotokas.


-- Mark