Re: Stress and vowel length in Tirelat

Herman Miller:
<<
I still haven't found any clear cases of vowel length being distinctive.
 >>

Oh, you can figure it out.  The hard part will be getting a set of live
native speakers of Tirelat.  Once that's done, though, you'll be able
to cook something up.

HM:
<<
One of the most likely examples, _marat_ "window" vs. _maraat_
"basket", could alternatively be treated as a distinction in stress:
_márat_ vs. _marát_.
 >>

So here's what you do.  Run an experiment that compares all
of these:

1.) [ma:.'rat]
2.) ['ma:.rat]
3.) ['ma.rat]
4.) [ma.'rat]
5.) [ma.'ra:t]
6.) ['ma.ra:t]

You'll need a bunch of others, but essentially, you'll be looking
for what word speakers think they're hearing.  Hopefully, (3)
will unambiguously be "window", and (5) will unambiguously
be "basket".  After that, though, the question will be what do
speakers do with (6), for example?  Is the stress more important
or the vowel length?  If speakers consistently say (6) is "window",
you'll know that stress > vowel length; if they say "basket", then
vowel length > stress.  If it you don't get a statistically significant
result, hey, at least you got the funding for the experiment!

My honest guess is that it's vowel length.  You don't necessarily
need minimal pairs to determine this.  Take some of your sample
CV(:)CV(:) words:

-/mutaa/ "no one"
-/nuka/ "to return"
-/riiva/ "sky"

I don't have stress on these, but unless you have a CVCV words
contrasting in stress, then it seems like what you have here is a
language with long and short vowels, and stress that gets attracted
to heavy things.  Think about the speakers, for example.  It doesn't
matter if you don't have /muuta/ = "x" and /muta/ = "y".  You
have *plenty* of examples of the following:

CVCV
CV:CV
CVCV:

Knowing that, a speaker must remember to pay attention to the
length of the vowel.  Even if CV:CV and CVCV: will always
have different stress patterns, CV:CV and CVCV will not.  So
even though there aren't many minimal pairs, a speaker must
assume this is an accident.  If they put too much faith in stress,
they'll be missing a lot of the information--especially in situations
where stress is neutralized.

Another way to think about it is this: if length started being
added to stressed short vowels, the long vowels would either
disappear, or become entirely predictable.  That's this guy's
opinion, anyways.  :)

[Note: There is another option.  Perhaps in time x-1, there were
no long vowels at all in Tirelat.  Words of the CVCV: shape,
then, would be languages where stress was originally on the
final syllable, and the vowel was lengthened as a result.  In order
for this to work, though, several anomalies would have to be
explained.  First, it wouldn't make sense for there to be CVCV
forms *and* CV:CV forms, unless there were some sort of
consonant loss in all CV:CV forms.  Further, if all vowels before
word-final consonants were lengthened, that would be one
thing.  But while we have /linaar/ and /kavaal/, we also have
/laghal/.  Taken altogether, I think the explanation would become
far more complex than if Tirelat simply possessed long vowels
phonologically.]

-David
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