Vowel Length

Aini (2012, p. 639) notes that words which in Standard Malay have a medial /h/ have no /h/ in Dusun, so Malay jahat (‘cruel’) is raat [ɣaːt], and in the North Wind and the Sun passage, the Malay tahan (‘to last’) is taan [taːn]. DBP (2011, pp. 115 & 278) gives the orthography of these two words as rat and tan respectively, but this fails to indicate that the word has a long vowel.

The existence of words such as raat [ɣaːt] reflects the existence of long vowels, but phonologically a long vowel can be regarded as bisyllabic, so raat is /ɣaat/. Other words with long vowels are raa’ (‘blood’), raan (‘branch’), roo (‘chin’) and duu’ (‘there’).