Re: Babel Text in Obrenje

Christian Thalmann sikayal:

Sorry for the long response time--I don't do much e-mail on weekends.

> > but I did notice
> > your wonderfully unusual phonology?
>
> I'm glad you find it unusual -- it was beginning to sound annoyingly
> regular to me, like one o' dem bland Star Trek alien languages.  ;-)
Well, the voiceless schwa itself is a neat feature, and it was the thing
that most grabbed my attention.

Besides, Star Trek langs are bland because they're mostly ad-libbed
nonsense, and any language with some structure will do better.

> > Voiceless schwa?
>
> I don't even know whether that's a good description of what I mean...
> I often realize it as aspiration (after voiceless stops) or
> syllabification (after voiceless non-stops).  Either way, it clearly
> gives the preceding voiceless consonant ample room for articulation
> and prevents it from being assimilated to the following word.
>
> mate /ma:t_h/
> mace /ma:s=/
This is as good of a description as I can think of, given the information
that you have.  Under a more sophisticated phonological analysis it might
turn out differently.  With that in mind, though, consider where the
voiceless schwa can occur--all of your examples in the Babel text are
word-final.  What, then, is its phonemic status?  Then think about
syllable onsets and codas, to decide whether it's systemically a consonant
or a vowel.

Actually, looking at the data in the Babel text, I have an analysis to
make: there is no underlying voiceless schwa.  Rather, it's a rescue
strategy for taking care of unsyllabifiable final consonants.  Based on
the examples in the Babel text, it appears that the only valid syllables
are CV, CV:, and CVC; there are no CV:C syllables and no coda
cluster--i.e. no syllable may have more than two morae.  However, there
are words in Obrenje that violate this principle in their underlying
lexical forms, and on the surface these are rescued with the voiceless
schwa:

Underlying   Surface
/s/          [s#]
/tS/         [tS#]
/varo:S/     ["varo:S#]
/ni:s/       [ni:s#]
/vikk/       ["vikk#]

There is one apparent counterexample /"ko:tis#/, but this is a contraction
of three different words (according to the orthography), so it probably
doesn't apply.

I'm not sure if it works for everything, but that's what I thought of.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton