Thursday, December 9, 2010

How much Polynesian is too much Polynesian?

There's no denying that Koa has a particularly Polynesian-flavored phonology. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this was one of my original influences when I was first working on the language. As we know, though, the same theoretical phonology can produce very different results depending on frequencies, distributional constraints, etc.

Comparing an average body of Koa text to that of any Eastern Polynesian language, for instance, it's immediately obvious that Koa has fewer vowels, and fewer VV sequences. This has a huge effect on the way the language feels in the mouth and, more importantly, how easy it is for someone from a non-Oceanic part of the world to pronounce it.

In fact, I've striven to avoid an excessive pileup of vowels wherever I've been able. As things have been, the maximum number of sequential vowels has probably been limited structurally to 4, in phrases like nae a olu "see a flounder," and this is not particularly frequent. By far CV reigns, with just enough VV action to make things nice and fluid.

The reason I bring this up now is that, as I discussed earlier, I'm coming near the end of my particles, and finally needing to think seriously about where the VV contenders are going to fit in. For instance, I need a "must" particle; it occurred to me that it might be rather nice to use oe, which I glossed as "should" in the first edition of Ea Opi le Koa. The problem with this is that it immediately produces tokens that look way more Polynesian than anything prior. Let's check out some examples.

ni ma oe mene la talo "I've gotta go home now"
ai ni oe na te pa nae? "do I have to be invisible?"
se na oe ipo hu sahi "you don't have to drink wine"
ta oe luke tika "he's gotta read this"

(Honestly, quite apart from phonological considerations, I'm really wondering whether this is the way I want to do this. I conceived it in order to render the E-o -enda kind of semantic -- sahi oe pa ipo "wine that must be drunk -- but I'm not so sure anymore. Anyway, that's not really the point of this post.)

Allison says, quite rightly, "I think there's only so long you can side-step this kind of problem with the phonology you're working with. Sometimes those vowels are just going to want to have a party together in the middle of your sentence and there won't be a damn thing you can do about it." Nevertheless, there are definitely steps I can take to reduce the partying, and keeping forms like oe out of mid-phrase position is one of them.

So, then, a resolution: we'll just have to deal with the nae a olu kind of vowel clusters, and should try not to worry about them overmuch; but the VV particles need to be used for clause-scope functions where they'll find themselves in the company of other vowels as rarely as possible.

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