Last Updated: 2020-07-02
Background
Language Family: Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Eastern Malayo-Polynesian / Oceanic / Western Oceanic / Papuan Tip / Nuclear Papuan Tip / North Papuan Mainland-D’Entrecasteaux / Bwaidoga
- Also known as Vivigani, Iduna is spoken in the Milne Bay province of Papua New Guinea.
Phonology
Consonants
- [p] occurs in free variation with /b/ (Sampson and Huckett 1965, 10).
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Place of Articulation
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Manner of Articulation
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Labial
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Alveolar
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Palatal
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Velar
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Glottal
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Stops
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b
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t d
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k ɡ
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ʔ
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Fricatives
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f v
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h
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Nasals
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m
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n
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Approximants
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w
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l
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j
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Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless, whereas those on the right are voiced.
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Vowels
- Sampson and Huckett (1965) argue for /a/ rather than /ɑ/ (p. 21).
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Front
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Back
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High
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i
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u
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Mid
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e
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o
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Low
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ɑ
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Alphabet
- /u/ (rather than /w/) is held to be the underlying phoneme for consonant labialization, because Iduna disallows consonant clusters (Sampson and Huckett 1965, 30; Lucht 1992, 3).
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Grapheme
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Phoneme
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Comment
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a
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/ɑ/
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b
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/b/
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d
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/d/
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e
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/e/
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f
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/f/
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g
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/ɡ/
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h
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/h/
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i
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/i/
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k
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/k/
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l
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/l/
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m
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/m/
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n
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/n/
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o
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/o/
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s
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/t/
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[s] is just a spirantized allophone of /t/
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t
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/t/
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u
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/u/
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v
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/v/
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w
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/u/; /w/
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/u/: in C_V position; /w/: elsewhere
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y
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/j/
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’
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/ʔ/
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Lenition Rules
- /t/ spirantizes to [s] before front vowels (Lucht 1992, 3; Sampson and Huckett 1965, 9).
- Word-medial /ɡ/ spirantizes to [ɣ] (ibid.).
Misc. Rules
- Phrase-final /d/ devoices and aspirates, yielding [tʰ] [Lucht (1992), p. 3].
- /u/ nasalizes after /m/ (Sampson and Huckett 1965, 20).
- Unstressed /ɑ/ raises to [ʌ] (Sampson and Huckett 1965, 21).
- In C_V contexts, /u/ is realized as simply a labialization of the preceding consonant (Sampson and Huckett 1965, 6).
- The transcriptions provided in Sampson and Huckett (1965) show that /ʔ/ is predictably inserted word-initially before a vowel.
- /d/ varies freely between [d] and [tʰ] before /i/ (Sampson and Huckett 1965, 10).
References
Lucht, Ramona. 1992. “Iduna Organised Phonology Data.” SIL International.
Sampson, Nancy, and Joyce Huckett. 1965. Vivigani Phonemes. Summer Institute of Linguistics.