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Home > Rotokas language


 

Rotokas is a language spoken in Bougainville, an island to the east of New Guinea, part of Papua New Guinea. It is part of the East Papuan language family. Its main claim to fame, linguistically speaking, is that it possesses one of the world's smallest phonemic inventories: 6 consonants (p t k v r g) and 5 vowels (a e i o u); the /t/ phoneme has the allophone [s] before /i/. Only Pirahã has fewer.

Thus, the Rotokas alphabet consists of the eleven letters A E I G K O P R T U V.

1 Phonology

The phonemes of Rotokas, in SAMPA notation, are as follows:

Bilabial Alveolar Velar Vl. stop p t k Vd. stop g Vd. fricative B Vl. fricative s Vd. tap 4

Vowels A e i o u

In the orthography, v stands for SAMPA /B/, a voiced bilabial fricative, and r for SAMPA /4/.

2 Grammar

Rotokas normally uses Subject Object Verb word-order, with adjectives and demonstrative pronouns preceding the nounA noun or noun substantive is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. Nouns are parts of speech and can be classified in different ways such as proper nouns (e. Janet") versus common nouns (e. girl"), or collec they modify, and most adverbAn adverb is a part of speech that normally serves to modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, clauses, and sentences. Adverbs answer such questions as how when where in what way or how often In English, adverbs often have the suffix ly but so do many adjs following the main verb. It uses postpositionA postposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that expresses some sort of relationship between a noun phrase (its object) and another part of the sentence; an adpositional phrase functions as an adjective or adverb. Postpositions are adpos.

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