Re: Brief Notice of Rogers Re: Moraic writing system

At 13:16 +0000 2005-08-07, Richard Wordingham wrote:

>Nasalised vowels are a bit complicated. If one interprets vowel
>initial syllables as beginning with a glottal stop, then one can say that:

The glottal stop is not a part of the phonetic
inventory of Vai. Why do you insert it into your
analysis?

>1. Nasalisation always occurs after nasal (not pre-nasalised!) consonants.
>
>2. Nasalisation is contrastive after glottal, labiovelar and velar
>consonants. (A form of rhinoglottophilia!)

kp and gb aren't labiovelar; that term is used
for kw and gw, is not not? Kp and gb have double
labial and velar articulation, but I think that
is a different thing.

>4. There are seven oral but only five nasalised vowels in the Vai
>language. (The missing nasalised vowels are (high) /e/ and /o/.)
>Most apparently permissible combinations of consonant and nasalised
>vowel are not represented in the script. Full sets of five nasalised
>vowel occur in the both language and script only after the glottal
>consonants.
>
>On the basis of the above, I would say that vowel nasalisation is a
>feature of the preceding consonant (cf. Irish mh).

I thnk it mighty dangerous to derive phonetic
analysis from the orthography. When I say lámh or
creideamh or Samhain in Irish, I do not have a
nasal vowel, and nasalization is not common in
this environment.

I don't really know what the rest of your analysis is meant to do.

--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com