Pronunciation of "Samoa"

Mon Mar 5 23:01:53 UTC 2012

What is in a name? What is in a country/language name? First one has to agree with Andy who points out the complexities of pronunciation. Second, language/country names are a can of worms, especially when gazetted by Europeans for unsuspecting speakers of non-literate languages (and even literate languages such as the ones in India and China have reassigned such names to fit better with their own languages). There are many modern contradictions that arise from a confused situation. Take the so-called Samoans: there are still a few Samoans in Samoa who have Samoan as their first language even though the formal education is mainly/all in English (NZ English in Samoa and US English in American Samoa). Next time you meet one ask them - in your best Samoan - what he/she call his/her language and his/her island and/or country. Then there are all the Samoans who live in Samoa and speak vaying degrees of English and Samoan. Ask one of them. Then there are the Samoans who have migrated to NZ, OZ and US. Some are new migrants some are the children of migrants, some are the grandchildren of migrants, etc. Ask them also. Then there are the academics in NZ, OZ and US who research and occasionally teach Samoan language. Few of them are native speakers of Samoan. Ask them also and you are likely to get a very exagerated, i.e. very carefully pronounced version, sometimes with a slightluy confused rule application (almost impossible to be dissuaded even by a native speaker). People who contribute to language items on Wikipedia are often well-meaning but out of their depth when it comes to the complexities of pronunciation. After all Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English is still an incredible tome that few academics have mastered, so how could they possibly make pronouncements on languages they know mainly by reading and writing.

Cheers

Wolfgang Sperlich
wsperlich at hotmail.com
http://wolfgangsperlich.blogspot.com/

From: andrew.pawley at anu.edu.au
To: uritadmor at yahoo.com; an-lang at anu.edu.au
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 11:45:33 +1100
Subject: Re: [An-lang] Pronunciation of "Samoa"

Dear Chris and Uri

Stress placement in Samoan is a bit more complicated than Uri's description indicates.  When words are spoken in isolation the main stress occurs on the penultimate mora (a long vowel being two mora).  So for Samoa, you will hear [,sa:'moa], as Chris says. However, in this case the penultimate stress represents an intonation contour stress or peak, not inherent to the word itself, just because intonation stresses normally fall on the penultimate mora of an intonational phrase. When another word or affix follows a four mora word, such as sa:moa, in the same intonational phrase, there is equal stress on the first mora and the penultimate mora of that word, but the contour stress/peak falls on the penultimate syllable of the intonation contour.  So fa?a-sa:moa-ina 'make into Samoan, Samoanize' would be ['fa?a'sa:'moa^ina] (using ^ to represent contour stress and ? to represent glottal stop). 

And there's a pitch contrast between non-final (or comma) intonation peaks/stresses and utterance final (full-stop) ones. 

Andy Pawley

PS. I use mora rather than syllable to reckon stress placement, because some would argue that long vowels and vowel sequences such as ai, ei, ou are best analysed as single syllables (of two mora). Maybe so but in slow speech in contour final position one often hears 'te^ine 'girl' instead of ^teine.  I think Uri is right about Samoa sometimes being spoken with a rearticulated short vowel [aa] in slow speech.

On 03/04/12, Uri Tadmor <uritadmor at yahoo.com> wrote:

Hi Chris,

When I lived in Honolulu, which has a large Samoan community, I made a very similar observation, with a small difference: I often heard a rearticulated short vowel (aa) instead of one long vowel (a:).  This is most conspicuous in slow, careful speech, but not limited to it.  The stress is consistenly on the penult, as you point out.  In fact, I made a similar observation about Hawaiian--that, for exmple, the location of the main campus of the University of Hawai'i, Manoa, is pronounced (maa'noa) and definitely not ('ma:noa).  Since there is no glottal stop between the two short vowels they can coalesce phonetically to one long vowel (which in rapid connected speech can even shorten), but the stress is always on the penult.  Systemically this analysis makes sense, because it would mean that all Hawaiian vowels may occur adjacent to each other, including like vowels.  Eliminating the alleged constraint against adjacent like vowels would make the phonology more economical.

Best,

Uri

Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2012 12:35:47 -0800
From: Christopher Allen Sundita <csundita at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [An-lang] Pronunciation of "Samoa"
To: an-lang at anu.edu.au

I was looking at the Wikipedia article on Samoan (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoan_language ) and I disagreed with
how the Samoan pronunciation of the name of the language was
represented in IPA, ['sa:moa]. Saying it out loud makes me think of a
Finnish word :-)

Listening to Samoans say it (in English) over the years, it seems like
that the primary stress falls on the penult while the lengthened first
syllable bears secondary stress. I'd render it in IPA as [,sa:'moa].

I'm not sure. But I'm interested in knowing what those of you familiar
with Samoan phonology think...

Thanks / Fa'afetai!

--Chris Sundita
Seattle

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