Notes on the Synchronic Phonology of Nauruan

Abstract

1 Notes on the Synchronic Phonology 2 of Nauruan 3 Lev Blumenfeld 4 CARLETON UNIVERSITY 5 This article proposes an analysis of several aspects of Nauruan synchronic 6 phonology. It establishes inventories and contrasts among consonants and 7 vowels, and offers an analysis of the stress system. Underlying quantity 8 and quality contrasts are obscured by allophonic processes affecting vowels, 9 but can be revealed if stress information is taken into account. A Nauruan 10 Swadesh list is supplied in the appendix. 11 Keywords: Nauruan; Stress; Quantity; Micronesian 12 1. INTRODUCTION.1 13 1.1. LANGUAGE, DATA, AND PRIOR WORK. Nauruan is a Micronesian 14 language spoken by just under 10,000 people in the Republic of Nauru and 15 by diaspora communities elsewhere (Eberhard, Simons, and Fennig 2021). 16 Linguistics research on Nauruan has been less extensive than on its 17 Micronesian relatives. The ethnographic description of Hambruch (1914– 18 1915) and the grammar by Kayser (1993 [1937]) provide some early resources. 19 In the 1970s, Nathan and colleagues began the search for Austronesian cog20 nates (Nathan 1973a), and took the initial steps toward a synchronic description 21 (Nathan 1973b; Hough 1974). Fieldwork focused on the classifier system was 22 carried out by Johnson (1999, 2002). More recently, two researchers visited 23 Nauru for on-site fieldwork. The fruits of that work are now becoming avail24 able: Blumenfeld, Burness, and Riley (2015) and Blumenfeld (2017) proposed 25 a new analysis of Nauruan stress and length, and Hughes investigated the syn26 chrony and diachrony of Nauruan phonology, culminating in his PhD thesis 27 (Hughes 2020). Among other results, Hughes established the classification 28 of Nauruan as a Micronesian language. The present sketch builds on this work, 29 and offers a phonemicization of Nauruan with special attention to stress and 30 quantity. 1. I am grateful to my Nauruan consultants, audiences at COOL10, LSA, MOT, to Kevin Hughes, Ken Rehg, and to my Carleton colleagues for helpful comments. I am especially gratefult to Alamanda Lauti for continuing help with all aspects of my work with Nauruan. The work was supported in part by an SSHRC Insight Development Grant #430-2013-000826. Oceanic Linguistics, Volume 61, no. 2 (December 2022)© by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 31 The materials used in this sketch the description include the following: 32 (i) word lists in carrier phrases (about 600 items); (ii) recordings of possessive 33 paradigms of directly possessed nouns; (iii) recordings of stories and legends 34 from a printed collection (Detudamo n.d.); (iv) a recording of about 6000 head35 words from Jacob et al. (1996), a draft of the Nauruan dictionary, collected 36 for a dictionary project; and (v) recordings of approximately eighty hours of 37 morphosyntactic elicitation. The data were collected over several visits to 38 Nauru between 2014 and 2018 (four months total time on site), with five speak39 ers aged between thirty-five and seventy, with the majority of data coming from 40 two speakers in their forties and fifties. A significant portion of the data resulted 41 from a collaborative project with the local community on re-digitizing an old 42 dictionary draft (Jacob et al. 1996). Spontaneous speech is conspicuously lack43 ing on this list, but I believe that a reasonable analysis of the phonology can be 44 made with the data available. 45 In the remainder of this section, I discuss general methodological issues. 46 Consonant inventory is discussed in section 2, and vowels in section 3. The 47 stress system, which ties the analysis together, is introduced in section 4, with 48 evidence, analysis, and predictions. While the present treatment is in substantial 49 agreement with that of Hughes (2020), there are some differences, which are dis50 cussed in section 5. I conclude with brief notes on Micronesian parallels of 51 Nauruan patterns and on the orhtography. The appendix supplies a Swadesh list. 52 1.2. A NOTE ON DESCRIPTIVE GOALS. It is easiest to first say what this 53 paper is not about. This is not a paper primarily focused on arguing theoretical 54 claims or committed to a particular framework. Rather, it draws on some very 55 basic theoretical concepts...