Talk:Bantoanon language

Counting phonemes
Both numbers corrected. --Thnidu (talk) 03:16, 15 June 2017 (UTC)
 * 1) "Asi has sixteen consonants: p, t, k, b, d, g, m, n, ng, s, h, w, l, r and y."
 * p,t,k + b,d,g + m,n,ng + s,h + w,l,r,y = 3+3+3+2+4 = 15, not 16.
 * 1) There are four vowels: a, i/e, and u/o."
 * 2) * That's three phonemes, five phones, but no way is it four of anything.

Allophony
The description of the vowel allophones is ambiguous. It is open to two interpretations, one of which is contradictory:


 * The vowels i and e are allophones, with i always being used when it is the beginning and sometimes end of a syllable, and e always used when it ends a syllable. The vowels u and o are allophones, with u always being used when it is the beginning and sometimes end of a syllable, and o always used when it ends a syllable.

This describes two phonemes: a front vowel (call it /i/) and a back vowel (call it /u/). (The third vowel, /a/, apparently has no such allophony.) In the first sentence, about /i/, consider the clause "e [is] always used when it ends a syllable". If syllable-final /i/ is always pronounced [e], then it cannot be "sometimes" pronounced [i]. The second sentence, about /u/, is exactly parallel in construction and has exactly the same problem.

The other interpretation is that "always" and "sometimes" apply to the allophones, not the phonemes. That is, whenever the phoneme /i/ is always pronounced [i] when syllable-initial, and also sometimes when syllable-final; the allophone [e] only occurs at the end of a syllable (and similarly for the back vowel). We can present this as a table:

(I may have to make the edits tomorrow.)

--Thnidu (talk) 04:04, 15 June 2017 (UTC)