Re: quantitative meter, accent and verse form

At 2:57 PM -0500 04/10/02, William Annis wrote:
>         I've recently been reading "How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of
>Indo-European Poetics" by Calvert Watkins.  While it seems that
>syllable counting schemes were the most basic metrical forms for the
>earliest IE poets, the role of quantitative meter in several of the
>early IE languages also developed quite early.
>
>         I'm curious to know:
>
>             1) if anyone has created any languages where vowel
>quantity is significant;
Miapimoquitch has contrastive vowel length.

>             2) if so, was stress or pitch accent employed, or none at
>all; and finally
In Miapimoquitch, syllable prominence is realized primarily by higher
pitch and secondarily by greater amplitude. Syllables are stressed if
they are initial in the foot. The foot in Miapimoquitch is the moraic
trochee and has the following realizations (parentheses enclose feet):

(cvcv), (cvv), (cvc): the "canonical trochee" containing two morae
(cvcvv), (cvcvc): the trochee with resolution
(cvcvcv): the augmented foot; the structure of this foot is actually
((cvcv)cv), with the final light syllable being adjoined to an
existing disyllabic canonical trochee. Note that *((cvc)cv) and
*((cvv)cv) are not well-formed feet under adjunction; hence the
proviso that the augmented foot be built on a disyllabic canonical
trochee.

>             3) has anyone tried to work with formal verse forms in
>their constructed languages?  Successfully?
I haven't gotten that far with Miapimoquitch. I'm not sure that the
Miapimoquitch have formal verse forms; I suspect that much of their
singing and oral poetry will be metrical in a way that is unfamiliar
to Western poetic practice. Poetic strategies will likely include
sound substitutions, vacuous reduplication (that is, reduplication
without morphological content), and vocables, all of which are amply
attested in Native American traditions.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                  Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

Man deth swa he byth thonne he mot swa he wile.
'A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.'

- Old English Proverb

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