Re: Dragging heavy feet

David J. Peterson wrote:
> Tristan wrote:
> <<
> Again, ‘*takanat’ would be forbidden just as forbidden as ‘*taka’ by
> these rules as it’s not possible to analyse it as consisting of two
> heavy feet (at least, if we assume that unfooted syllables are
> forbidden, and aside from suffixes, a foot consists of a max. two
> syllables. These might not be the rules I finally decide on).
>  >>
>
> And snipping the rest.
>
> There doesn't seem to be any linguistic reason that such a language
> should not exist, even if it doesn't happen to.  I think it might
> argue for one type of language over another.  For example, it
> might not make a good agglutinative language:
>
> cat-PLU.-1-POS-PLU-DAT
> "to our two cats"
>
> Assuming that "cat" could, by itself, be a word, and that it could
> also be a word with any one of those affixes, that word would
> be something like:
>
> kaani-nenta-maako-pulaa-nenta-tistu
Well, I don’t think there’s ever a requirement that every morpheme is a
valid foot in itself (close to home we have English with -ed/-s, neither
of which contain a vowel; IIRC even Japanese does!). So it might in fact be:

   /kan+ta+ko+pu+ta+tis/ => [(kan.ta).(ko:.pu).(ta.tis)]
                     or  => [(kan.ta).(kop.tats)]

In fact, this was kinda why I was thinking of going this way with a
conlang...

Minor variations on a theme also give some fun dialectal differentiation
for cheap!

> That'd get a bit wordy.  Unless there was a massive series of
> allomorphy rules, so that, just in case the word *could* exist,
> each affix had a light form and a heavy form:
>
> kaani-n-am-pu-n-tistu
> [(kaa.ni).(nam.pu)n.(tis.tu)]
This is of course similar to that, but my own suggestion I think is both
more plausible and easier to design :) Does make me wonder about the
orthography tho. Does a word get spelt in its phonetic form or its
underlying form?

> Guess that "n" would be extra metrical...  Or would it matter if
> the foot was super-heavy?
No matter, I have a few of them in the examples! At least under my
present thoughts...

--
Tristan.