The modern Rotokas alphabet is a
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
consisting of only 12 letters of the
ISO basic Latin alphabet
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and u ...
without diacritics:
It is the smallest
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...
in use today. The majority of the
Rotokas
Rotokas is a North Bougainville language spoken by about 4,320 people on the island of Bougainville, an island located to the east of New Guinea which is part of Papua New Guinea. According to Allen and Hurd (1963), there are three identifie ...
people are literate in
their language. In the Rotokas writing system the vowel letters have their
IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners ...
values, though they may be written double, ''aa, ee, ii, oo, uu,'' for
long vowel
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, f ...
s. The consonant letters have the following
values
In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of something or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live (normative ethics in ethics), or to describe the significance of dif ...
:
*''G'': or
*''K'':
*''P'':
*''R'': , or
*''S'': or (only occurs before ''I'' and in the name ''Rotokas'')
*''T'': (never occurs before ''I'')
*''V'': or
Here is a sample of written Rotokas:
:''Osireitoarei avukava iava ururupavira toupasiveira.''
:"The old woman's eyes are shut."
References
Latin alphabets
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