6 [p. 10]
CHAPTER ONE. PHONOLOGY.
——————— ORTHOGRAPHY AND PRONUNCIATION.
Orthography.
11. In the spelling system adopted for Mori, use is made of the following letters and digraphs:
Vowels: a, e, i, o, u
Consonants: Laryngeal: ’, h Velar:
k, ngk, g, ngg, ng Praepalatal:
r Supradental:
t, nt, d, nd, n, s, ns, l Labial:
p, mp, b, mb, m, w There are no vowel digraphs, and where two or more vowels occur in succession these represent separate sounds,
for example boe ‘pig’, poea ‘name of a tree’, wue Upper Mori ‘betel’, molue ‘broad, great of surface area’, umi’ie Upper Mori ‘weep’.
1
To avoid confusion, a hyphen is used to indicate doubling only when no more and no less than two syllables are reduplicated, thus kanandio andio ‘now’, kuku ‘nail, hoof’ without hyphen. Included under ‘two syllables’ are cases
of prenasalization or loss of glottal stop, thus mentoro-toro ‘somewhat sitting’, kontade-tade ‘standing’. [p. 11]
The use of a hyphen is eschewed when the portion of the word which would follow the hyphen does not begin with a consonant, including glottal stop. Thus if one would write the word for ‘now’ as one word—it actually consists of two
words—the spelling kanandioandio is to be chosen over kanandio-andio, because the latter spelling might make one think of a glottal stop between the o and the a.
12. Just as in Pamona, the rule has also been adopted in Mori that whenever a word is followed by one or more
single syllable enclitics, these are written together with that word, e.g. mateomo mate + o + mo ‘it is already dead’, in which o can be considered as a suffix see §§ 142 ff.. Theoretically less correct, but to be commended for
practical reasons, pronominal prefixes and suffixes which consist of two or more syllables are written separately, e.g. iwee aku 3
SG
:give 1
SG
‘he gave me it’, kuwee komiu 1
SG
:give 2
PL
I give it to you all, to you polite’, raha mami house 1
PLX
.
POS
‘our house’, etc. This inconsistency takes its revenge, however, as soon as a two-syllable suffix is not separated by a consonant from the word with which it belongs, such as in Upper Mori noweeaku the
same as Tinompo iwee aku, where aku has no glottal preceding it.
1
[Postscript, p. 10] In the Molio’a dialect pronounced ume’ie. [footnote 1, p. 10] Indigenous writers often transgress the rules given here, such as omitting the glottal stop ’. Even those who have the obligation to accustom the youth to place a glottal
stop in words such as we’o ‘female animal that is stout and fat and thus as a rule past bearing age’, si’e ‘rice barn’, etc., omit it in practice, or else place a glottal stop where none is heard, such as a Mori teacher who in place of mo’ia-’ia ‘remain’ regularly
wrote mo’i’a’i’a.
This rule does not apply with respect to proclitics. These words are always written separate from the word with which they belong, e.g. aku lumako 1
SG
.
FUT PART
:go ‘I shall go’, likewise ta lumako 3
SG
.
FUT PART
:go ‘he shall go’, etc.
2
In some cases one may waiver over whether one has to do with one or two words, as for example in isema ‘who?’, which properly consists of the article i and the stem sema, and in isua ‘where?’, which is compounded from
the preposition i and the stem sua. Practically speaking, this question is of very little importance.
Pronunciation.
13. Diphthongs are not encountered in Mori. The pronunciation of ai, au, ei, etc. is thus: an a followed by an i,
an a followed by an u, an e followed by an i, etc. This is evident, among other places, in poetry
3
and from stress placement; compare § 17.
The sounds aa, ee, ii, oo and uu stand in proportion to a, e, i, o and u as respectively “long” and “short” vowels in the true sense of these words, that is to say the sequence aa etc. is twice as long as a etc.. The first-mentioned
five sounds must be considered to each contain two syllables. That this is the correct interpretation emerges clearly from poetry see J.
Kruyt 1924:174 ff., 209–210, from stress placement §
17, and from two-syllable reduplication, where for example in memee-meene ‘don’t go to sleep, stay up until the day meene dawns’, mee
counts for two syllables.
4
Likewise [p. 12]
there are long sounds which constitute three syllables, e.g. kuwooo ‘I smell it’, stem woo + o, kunaaakono ‘I set it in it’, stem naa + ako.
5
Mori is a vocalic language, that is to say, closed syllables are not encountered. One can rightly speak of ‘half-closed’ syllables, namely when the onset consonant of the following syllable is prenasalized.
14. V
