Re: Rotokas (was: California Cheeseburger)

Roger Mills said:
>
> As I recall, this is a solution
> that would have been favored in Pikes "Phonemics", the book I cut my teeth
> on in 1969, and which [at least at one time] was the approach favored by
> the SIL.
A few years later, but me too. Dow Robinson was the main instructor, and
we were using a draft of his textbook and workbook as well as Pike. They
gave us native speakers of various languages as instructors for the
practical phonetics sessions. (A guy who grew up bilingual in English and
Sango was on the mat for labiovelar day.)


> There might even be ?*/kaaaa/, no?
Given an appropriate stress pattern, that wouldn't surprise me at all.


> Does the primary source say there are _phonemic_ long vowels?
No, it says the 5 vowels of Rotokas also occur phonemically lengthened.


> Six of one....Given the apparent paucity of data, one might suspect that
> perhaps the investigator him/herself had not come to a decision.
However, the Firchows continued to publish on Rotokas through 1987 -- and
I'm pretty sure they had control of the orthography. AFAIK, they never
revised their basic 1969 phonology in any of the later publications, so
they must of thought it was still valid.


> Fijian, Hawaiian  et al. (with (C)V structure) have "long vowels", which
> at least in older sources are written with macrons-- but the general
> consensus has usually been they are vowel _sequences_.
Rotokas is not Austronesian, of course, but I think everybody probably
agrees that most Papuan languages have been exposed to some pretty serious
influence from Austronesian -- there are some Austronesian langs still
spoken on part of the island, IIRC. Still, there are also East Papuan
languages with much more complex phonologies than Rotokas right on the
same island.
*shrug*


> Some Philippine languages also have long vowels-- some arise due to
> morphophonemics (certain prefixes/derivations lengthen vowels) but the
> majority simply correlate with penultimate stress, so there are contrasts
> like ?*['pa:nat] vs. ?*[pa'nat] (in Tagalog e.g. would be written |panat|
> -- |panát|).  That leads to six-of-one arguments as to whether length is
> the relevant factor, or stress.
Other things being equal, only PET scans can tell for sure. :)

(Is the second phoneme in English "skip" a /k/ or a /g/? And does this
question have a general answer for all native speakers?)


-- Mark

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