Consonants
A tentative analysis reveals that Rongga has a consonant system shown in the following table:
Vowels
Rongga has quite a symmetrical vowel system, where six vowel units are identified.
Hover your mouse over the example word to hear the sound of the vowel.
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Oppositions of stop in Rongga Rongga makes a four-way opposition in stops: i) voiced, ii) voiceless, iii) preglottalised, and iv) prenasalasied. Examples of minimal pairs showing this are bha [?ba] ‘plate' vs ba [ba] ‘tub', bhowa [?bowa] ‘open' vs mbowa [mbowa] ‘a kind of stone or rock near the surface of the sea' vs powa [powa] ‘a kind of sea fish', and rebha [re?ba] ‘good' vs repa [repa] ‘sound'. A preglottalised stop in a word-initial position results in lenition of the stop. It appears that the velar fricative [ © ], traditionally written by the local people as gh , is a consequence of a similar lenition process, i.e. an attempt to make speedy successive blockages in two adjacent positions (glottal and velar) cannot be fully completed, which then results in constriction of the airflow producing a fricative sound. |
Phonotactics Rongga typically has an open syllable structure (V or CV). A preglottalised or prenasalised consonant in medial position, however, gets the glottal or nasal segment realigned to become the coda of the preceding syllable, causing the preceding syllable to become a closed one, e.g. penda ‘pineapple' is pronounced as [pen.da] not *[pe.nda]. While Rongga phonotactics allow a consonant to occur syllable-finally in a word-medial position, no consonant is permitted in word-final position in its true lexical items. Thus, when there is a word-final closed (C)VC structure, it is almost certain that it is a loan word. |