Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 October 11

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October 11

Vowel length in "Samoa"

As I have heard it pronounced by Samoans (not sure if American Samoans or otherwise), the first vowel in "Samoa" is lengthened (not as in the idea of a "long vowel" as taught to American schoolchildren, but literally longer, held for a longer amount of time). This is typically elided in English because English doesn't really have vowel length.

But our article on American Samoa gives the pronunciation as [ˈsaːmʊa], whereas our article on Samoa gives it as [ˌ'saːmoa].

I don't really know what the second transcription means; it looks like a primary and a secondary stress on the same syllable. Does that even make sense? Is it a way of indicating vowel length? How do you indicate it in IPA? Or am I just imagining the whole "length" thing? (I really don't think the last is the case; I confirmed the lengthened aː with someone from there.) --Trovatore (talk) 16:27, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, partly answering my own question -- vowel length#IPA says the symbol for a long vowel is ː placed after the vowel. Huh. I thought that was for an off-glide. So why then do we use it in phonemic transcriptions like /ˈfɑːðɚ/ for "father"? To my ear, the aː in (natively pronounced) "Samoa" is much longer than the ɑː in "father". Is it just that I don't distinguish the underlying [a] and [ɑ] vowels? (I don't really think that's it.) --Trovatore (talk) 17:23, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

This may be complete OR, but the sense I've had for a long time is that the spelling is similar to "cocoa", in that there are only 2 syllables, the second being spelt "oa" for who-knows-what-obscure-reason. In other words, if we were spelling Samoa for the first time today, we'd spell it "Samo". And pronounce it accordingly. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't think I've come across that. The [moa] part could be treated as a single syllable, maybe, but I think the [o] and [a] are distinct sounds.

But in any case what I'm really wondering about is the first vowel, which seems to me about double in length -- something like Saa-moa. Apparently this is notated [ˈsaː], which would be fine, except that this ː symbol is also used for English words, where it doesn't seem to mean the same thing. --Trovatore (talk) 20:54, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Just to stir the muddy waters, I note that Cambridge dictionaries offer UK ​ /səˈməʊ.ə/ US ​ /səˈmoʊ.ə/ (stress on the second syllable), which accords much better with the pronunciation I'm familiar with. OR: I've heard rugby commentators using a long saː, with more or less equal stress on the first two syllables. Even more OR (but hey, what else is the ref desk for?) there's a traditional English pronunciation, a local Samoan pronunciation, and people probably feel the latter is more 'correct' and so we should be using something more in that direction. Obviously they're wrong, but I think that's the cause of the confusion. Henry^Flower 21:33, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

I'm talking specifically about the Samoan pronunciation, not the English. I thought I had made that sufficiently clear, but perhaps not. --Trovatore (talk) 21:38, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

The length mark is supposed to indicate the relevant length of the sound in a given language, not the absolute one. Thus, in Samoan, like in most Polynesian languages, long "a" is literally longer than its short "a". It has not to be necessarily as twice as long, or as 1.5 times as long, or whatever, simply long enough to be perceived such by the native speakers. The actual length in milliseconds may fluctuate greatly depending on the speaker, the tempo of speech, the style of speech, the language. Long vowels are not of the same length across different languages. So American English /ɑː/ may be indeed shorter than Samoan /aː/. The length mark for English long "ah" was actually devised by British phoneticians (particularly Daniel Jones), who modeled their transcription on RP, where long "ah" is the result of spelled "ar". American English /ɑ(ː)/ is of another origin: either in the "father"-type words or from (Middle) English short "o", and as well from long "aw" in places where the "cot-caught" merger is present. The long vowels in British English are indeed tangibly longer. In American English not so. Many, if not most, American phoneticians do not use the length mark for American English vowels.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 05:44, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

What Lüboslóv Yęzýkin is discussing here in a broader sense is covered by the study of phonology, which is to say the sound system of a language. The relevent part of phonology that is important for the discussion is that the phonology of one language does not always meaningfully map to another language; which is to say that sounds and sound distinctions in one langauge aren't always meaningful in another. In other words, allophones in one language are distinct sounds in another. Classically, we see this in English dialects with things like the Cot–caught merger, in dialects without the merger the vowel sounds /ɔ/ and /ɒ/ convey different meanings, which is to say that the words "cot" and "caught" are pronounced consistently different, and that difference indicates to speakers of that dialect that the words are different. In dialects with the merger, those vowels are treated as allophones of the same sound in free variation, which is to say that those speakers can't even hear a meaningful difference between those vowels. Especially relevent to support what Lüboslóv Yęzýkin is that one cannot meaningfully compare what a long vowel means to English and what the same long vowel means to Samoan. --Jayron32 11:51, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Related Q: What bowel length is required to accommodate a case of Samoas ? :-) File:Girl Scout Thin Mint and Samoa cookies (Girl Scouts of the USA).jpg. StuRat (talk) 20:48, 11 October 2017 (UTC)