There are no native Romulan speakers
By that, I mean there are no native Romulan speakers in real life. This is important to take
note of, since actors are typically unable to hear a
difference between and produce sounds that don't exist in their native languages. For most
Star Trek actors, their native language is English, which has no contrast between any rhotic
sounds, no aspiration contrasts, etc. This means that some sounds that exist in Trent
Pehrson's reference grammar might not be heard in the show, or some words that are meant to
be pronounced one way are pronounced in a more English-y way. In other words, all the speech
in the show has a non-Romulan accent.
There's nothing wrong with this, and it's probably impossible to not speak with an accent
anyway given that native Romulan speakers have never existed. The reason I bring it up is so
that we recognize that the accents might affect our analysis of the language, perhaps
diverging from Pehrson's original Romulan reference grammar (but hopefully not too much).
1st Person Singular Subject Prefix
In the official translations of Romulan, a 1st person singular subject appears a few times:
in utterance 22, 23, 47, and 48. I found that each of them starts with, or contains a word
that starts with, a rhotic sound (which, for native English speakers, are not contrastive),
and end with [a] (or a schwa that I debated transcribing as an [a]).
| # |
Impressionistic transcription |
Meaning |
| 22 |
[ɹanatuʃa] |
I grieve |
| 23 |
[ran veha strud͡ʒat pikard d͡ʒɹa kalankai] |
I have bound myself to Picard as qalankhai |
| 47 |
[ɹaʃant] |
I admit |
| 48 |
[sunan ɹəpeŋɡenaː] |
I was not expecting this |
The [ə] in 48 I found difficult to transcribe, and I debated whether this was really an
[a] that was slightly higher than usual. I'm inclined to say it's still a schwa, and that
it might have been written in the episode script with ⟨ra⟩ but spoken as [ɹə] in speech,
like ⟨ra⟩ in the word "rapport" when pronounced /ɹəˈpɔɹ/.
My conclusion is that /ra/ is a 1st person singular subject prefix, with the assumption
that the different rhotic sounds [ɹ] and [r] are non-contrastive. I think it's a
reasonable assumption to make, given that the actors are all native English speakers. If
/ra/ is indeed a 1PRS.SG.SUBJ prefix, then it's likely that the word it's attached to is a
verb.
I haven't done anything but a cursory glance at sentences that have non-singular or
non-subject 1st person referents, but I don't believe they are in conflict with my
conclusion. It would be worth it to look into this further, though.