Beluga: An Unknown Language

The language of Beluga violates a number of known linguistic universals but is beloved among phonologists for the orderliness of its phonological rules. Its fiercely independent people defend a culture encroached on by all sides by modernity, a culture centered around the idea of caviar (in Beluga lexical semantics, ideas like space and time are constructed out of complex metaphors about egg laying and sturgeon dens). But knowing this won't help at all with what follows:

Beluga has an 8 vowel system:

Front Back
i u
e o
ea oa
ae a
Verb Stems
r u u z o d eat caviar
t s a r l oa k make roe
n t o n oa l behave like a sturgeon
b u n o o t s spawn
v ea s i i m b swim upstream
y ae ae q i n drink champagne
f e s ea ea ng be caught in a net

Suffix vowels may either become front or back vowels depending on what stem they attach to. What is determined is their HEIGHT, one of the four heights in the chart:

  1. ^U becomes either u or i
  2. ^O becomes either e or o
  3. ^OA becomes either ea or oa
  4. ^A becomes either ae or a
Remember: The suffix realization varies with the stem it attaches to. It "harmonizes" in frontness/backness with the vowel of the stem. Examples are given below.

Morphotactics:

Here's the formula for a Beluga word: (parens mean optionality)

    Root (Augmen/Dimin) Asp (Evid) PerNum

where:

  1. Augmen/Dimin is an augmentative diminutive suffix (optional)
  2. Asp: Aspect particle
    1. perfective
    2. imperfective
    3. generic/habitual
    Feature Form Meaning
    +Perf ^Omb Perfective
    +Imp ^On Imperfective
    +Hab ^Udd Habitual, Generic
  3. An evidential particle specifying how the speaker came to know something:
    1. Direct Evidence (saw it)
    2. indirect evidence (heard something that something like it, smelled something, saw smoke and is talking about fire)
    3. heard something about it.
    4. negates it

    Evidential System
    Feature Form Meaning
    +Dir ^Ank Direct Evidence
    +Ind ^A^Av^Ot Indirect evidence
    +Hrd ^U^Uz Heard about it
    +Neg ^OAq Negation

  4. Person Number features

    Person Number
    Feature Form Meaning
    +1P +Sg ^Uvv^Or^A "I"
    +2P +Sg ^Om^Or^A You (Sing)
    +3P +Sg ^A^Ab^Ug^A he/she
    +1P +Pl +Incl ^A^Ab^Or^A we (inclusive)
    +2P +Pl ^Avv^U you (Plural)
    +3P +Pl ^Oam^A ^A^Ab^A

Helpful tip:

You're using multiple chacracter symbols to represent some vowels and some archi-vowels (the "under"specified vowels in the suffixes). This cannot occur in curly bracket notation. So what you did for The Bambona problem, representing, say PL "ed" as:

    %+Pl:{ed}
won't work for these suffixes and their multicharacter vowels. Although we mentioned the augmentative suffix in the morphotactics above, we haven't told you its shape yet. It is +Aug: ^U^Uk.

Thus for the +Aug suffix, You need to say one of the following in your lexicon: 

[ %+Aug .x. [ %^U %^U k ] ]
[ %+Aug : [ %^U %^U k ] ]
[ %+Aug : [ "^U" "^U" k ] ]
See Section 3.2.5, page 103

Attacking the problem

Define the lexicon using a script file (beluga-lex.xfst)

Just do the lexicon and the morphotactics in this file.

That means the transducer defined should do transductions like the following: 

tsarloak+Perf+1P+Sg   ->   tsarloak^Omb^Uvv^Or^A
Hand this in as Part A of your answer.

Part B of is of course the whole answer in which you add in the rule to handle the vowel changes of the Beluga suffixes. That can all be in one file or in two files, your choice.

  1. If you use one file, the make sure you've used the define command to define two separate transducers which are then composed. Transducer A does the morphotactics; Transducer B does the vowel changing.
  2. If you use two files the second will just be an augmentation of the first file with that additional rule. This file (call it beluga.xfst) should do the following transduction:
      tsarloak+Perf+1P+Sg -> tsarloakombuvvora

Helpful hint: When you have problems getting things to work, check your defined transducers one by one. Also don't forget the helpful command to print out your alphabet, as I have as I write these instructions (it's "[something] sigma").