Re: rotokas; practical syllabarology; et alia

Nik Taylor said:
> Mike Ellis wrote:
>> ... where it says that the s sound only occurs before i!
>
> Hmm ... sounds suspiciously like {s} is actually an allophone of /t/.
> That would explain why /s/ isn't usually listed as a phoneme.
>
>> The 350 might have been a typo for "35".
>
> :-)  Well, for one thing, it specifically said that Hawaiian, at 182
> syllables, had the fewest syllables.  Secondly, that site does also say
> that vowels in Rotokas can be long, and (C)V(:) would work out to 70
> (7*5*2).  I'm wondering if some of the vowel sequences might not've been
> being counted as diphthongs?

It's possible that somebody has done that, but there's no good reason to
posit more than 11 phonemes for Rotokas. There are no restrictions on
vowel sequences, so there's no reason to posit separate phonemes for long
vowels or diphthongs.

L1 literacy rate is pretty high for Rotokas, which may not have been the
case if its orthography diverged horribly from the real phoneme inventory.


-- Mark