Talk:Nauruan language

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Additional information: Related work groups (nations): Nauru work group Related work groups (territories):

Contents 1 IPA 2 Nauruan Scouting 3 Phonology part 4 "Children not learning Nauru"

[edit] IPA

Could we perhaps get some IPA symbols for pronunciation? I like "X as in the English/French word Y" as an additional guide, but the IPA is what's really needed to demonstrate different pronunciations. Also, am I correct that the digraph "ng" is supposed to represent the velar nasal? Because that should be stated clearly (and of course as ŋ.) Dkatten 18:10, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

The phonetic explanations are decipherable to some extent, but not completely. Here's what I gather for the vowels:

• a
  • 1 ("father"): [ɑ]
  • 2 ("madame"): [a]
  • 3 ("quantity"): [ɒ]
  • 4 ("lâche"): would be [ɑ], but what's the difference from #1??
  • 5 ("Mähne"): [ɛ] (same as e1 I assume?)
• e
  • 1 ("set"): [ɛ]
  • 2 ("pain"): [eɪ] ~ [ei] (?)
  • 3 ("épée"): [e]
• i
  • 1 ("Sinn"): [ɪ]
  • 2 ("ü + i"): maybe [ɨ] or [ʏ]??
• o
  • 1 ("roll"): [o] ~ [oʊ] ~ [ou]... hard to say which is meant
  • 2 ("son"): [ɒ] (or [ɔ], if different from a3?)
  • 3 ("Möhre, feu"): [ø]
• u
  • 1 ("took"): [ʊ]
  • 2 ("Mühe"): [y]
  • 3 ("Mühe deep"): ???
  • 4 ("u + ü"): [ʉ]

An explanation on whether these are all distinct phonemes would also be nice. (Probably not.) I suppose we'd need a linguistic's opinion to get this mess settled for certain. --Tropylium 10:59, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nauruan Scouting

Can someone please render "Be Prepared", the Scout Motto, into Nauruan? Thanks! Chris 05:13, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Phonology part

I understand the explanations given in the phonology part. But I have two questions: I don't think that Nauruan really uses "Umalauts". So why are õ and ũ used in the Nauruan language? Because I also noticed that there is no [øː] and [yː] at all (as Kayser describes in his "Nauru Grammar"). Ok, I understand that there is the [æ] and [ɛ] sound (so probably they would represent ã?).
My second question concerns the example word /e-oeeoun/ → [ɛ̃õ̯ɛ̃õ̯ʊn] ('hide'). Is there a rule when vowels become nasalized? And is there a rule when vowels are long or short? --Jamovi (talk) 10:55, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

As for nasalization, (Geoffrey 1974) has a footnote that says "some words associated with a /o/ which becomes a glide have nasalization associated with the vowels on either side. I have not yet been able to analyze this" (p 499).

I don't know about umlaut, though. It could mean that words with an umlaut that have been borrowed but aren't necessarily front rounded. That part is unsourced anyway. Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 19:28, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Children not learning Nauru"

The Ethnologue page says: "Children not learning Nauru."

Does it mean that all schools there are in English and Nauruans are deliberately abandoning their own language? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 22:58, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that's what it sounds like. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 23:17, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

OK, it sounds like it, but does anyone know what actually happens there? It sounds kinda strange that a nation, even small and unusual like Nauru, would just give up on its language so easily. Besides, Ethnologue is known to make weird mistakes (i don't have immediate examples to show, but i caught them a few times...). --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 23:56, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

It's not unusual at all for a group of people to, over the course of a few generations, drop their local/tribal language for an international lingua franca. It's somewhat surprising since the government counts Nauruan as an official language, but I believe you that Ethnologue is not reliable enough to accept unquestioningly. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]} 07:19, 23 January 2008 (UTC)