Pronunciation of "Samoa"

[Andrew Pawley]

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:
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> Hi Chris,
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> 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.
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> Best,
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> Uri
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> 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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> End of An-lang Digest, Vol 105, Issue 2
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