Developing an Orthography for Onya Darat (Western Borneo) Practical and Theoretical Considerations

Onya Darat is a language spoken, with great dialectal variation, in the interiorof western Borneo. It is the southernmost member of Land Dayak, a branchof the Austronesian language family. This article reports on the developmentof a writing system for Onya Darat. In addition to five vowels and 19 simpleconsonants, Onya Darat also exhibits three series of complex oral-nasalsegments: prenasalized oral stops, preoralized nasals, and postoralized nasals.An analysis of the Onya Darat sound system reveals that of these three seriesonly postoralized nasals are distinctive and therefore need to be representedin the writing system. The proposed orthography, developed with the aid ofnative speakers, represents all and only the phonemes of Onya Darat withoutresorting to diacritics or special characters

Developing an orthography for Onya Darat (western Borneo)

Onya Darat is a language spoken, with great dialectal variation, in the interior of western Borneo. It is the southernmost member of Land Dayak, a branch of the Austronesian language family. This article reports on the development of a writing system for Onya Darat. In addition to five vowels and 19 simple consonants, Onya Darat also exhibits three series of complex oral-nasal segments: prenasalized oral stops, preoralized nasals, and postoralized nasals. An analysis of the Onya Darat sound system reveals that of these three series only postoralized nasals are distinctive and therefore need to be represented in the writing system. The proposed orthography, developed with the aid of native speakers, represents all and only the phonemes of Onya Darat without resorting to diacritics or special characters.KeywordsOnya Darat, Land Dayak, orthographies, writing systems, phonology, Borneo, West Kalimantan

A comparison of the expression of simultaneity in Thai and English adults and children using short animations

The aim of the present study was to investigate the linguistic devices that Thai and English children aged 4 years, 5 years, 6 years, 7 years and adults use to express simultaneous or overlapping temporal relations depicted in short animations. Thai has imperfective aspectual morphemes but they are not morphologically grammaticalised on the verb and usage in general is optional and not obligatory. These particular aspectual characteristics of Thai form an interesting comparison with English, which has obligatory grammaticised aspectual marking on the verb. An additional aim is to investigate if these grammatical differences and degrees of obligatoriness of aspectual marking in English and Thai affect what particular aspects of the external simultaneous events depicted in the animations are expressed, and if so, do children and adults show the same language-specific patterns