Re: rotokas; practical syllabarology; et alia

Jean-François Colson said:
> At http://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/private/robstu/rotokas.html there's a
> "minimal pair" (tuta / tuuta) WITH RECORDINGS.

Not enough information there to be useful.

The existence of a pair like 'tuta' and 'tuuta' does not indicate that
'uu' has to be a single phoneme, of course. As I mentioned in an earlier
post, it only means that these forms are in phonemic contrast. Obviously,
/tuta/ and /tuuta/ are in phonemic contrast just as /tuta/ and /tu:ta/
would be. The existence of the minimal pair only demonstrates the phonemic
contrast; it doesn't help us decide what phonemes we need to represent the
forms.

The bottom set of examples refers to forms as "bisyllabic" without
specifying how syllables are defined. If he's using these to determine
whether or not long vowels should be treated as separate phonemes, then
that seems a bit circular. (If the forms are bisyllabic, then he's already
decided how many vowel phonemes are in them -- but we're not told why.)

As I said, there's not enough information here to be useful.


-- Mark