Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

Nik Taylor said:
> "Mark P. Line" wrote:
>> Any sequence of vowels is possible in Rotokas, including two of the same
>> vowel. There's no justification for positing separate phonemes for long
>> vowels (or diphthongs).
>
> Do you know this, or are you guessing?
Anytime I say something I'm just guessing about, I say so. Don't you?


> Just because sequences of vowels are possible doesn't rule out
> consideration of long vowels.
If you have a phonological analysis of Rotokas that shows how it's better
to have separate phonemes for long vowels, I'm all ears. The only analysis
I've seen posits 11 phonemes -- 6 consonants and 5 vowels.


> For example, stress rules may treat long vowels and diphthongs as single
> units.
Yes, there are lots of reasons why one might decide to represent long
vowels as separate phonemes, but none of them happen to apply to Rotokas.
If they did, Skip Firchow would have said so. Instead, he said that
Rotokas has 5 vowel phonemes.


> In Japanese, you can have more or less any sequence of vowels
> (there are some restrictions in native words, namely, no monomorphemic
> vowel+u), but it still makes sense to analyze a word like _okaasan_ as
> /oka:san/ rather than /okaasan/ for several reasons.  One, pitch-accent
> rules take note of both syllables and morae, the pitch-drop can only be
> located on the first mora of a two-mora syllable.  That is, it's
> assigned by syllable, and looks at okaasan as o-kaa-san.  It could well
> be that there are such phonetic processes in Rotokas that justify
> treating aa as /a:/.
It could well have been, but there aren't.


>> Orthographic 's' is a little suspicious in any event. The only
>> phonological statements I've seen (by Skip Firchow) have given 6
>> consonant
>> phonemes (not including /s/), but there are 7 consonant graphemes used
>> to
>> write the language (including 's', which only occurs before 'i'). I'll
>> ask
>> about that, too
>
> I'd guess that [s] is an allophone of /t/ before /i/.
It could also be an allophone of any other phoneme, if it's an allophone.
The question would still remain as to why it's written as 's' and not as
't'. The orthography might be multilectal, for example: there might be an
/s/ in one of the dialects that merges with some other phoneme in other
dialects. That's why I said I'd ask.


> I haven't looked
> at the data carefully,
What data?


-- Mark

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