Re: VCV syllables? (was: Different Words with Large Common Substrings)

On Fri, 7 Nov 2008 18:41:02 -0500, Alex Fink wrote:
>I think there are two words wanting here.  One is the word for a chunk of
>shape [edit] V*C*V* (a valley, or dingle).
I might go with "sesquisyllable", altho that usually refers to a C*@C*V*
shape. Or maybe on the analogy of "diphone": "disyllable" (as opposed to a
_bi_syllable C*V*C*V*!)

V*C* units could be called "extended rime", "antisyllable" or maybe
"Arrerntable". :)

BTW - a term for a tautosyllabic C*V* unit that may or may not comprise the
entire syllable would also be useful. Eg. a CVC syllable = onset C plus rime
VC, but also (??) CV + coda C. In other words, what is the basic unit in an
abugida? Allitereme?


>The other is a hyponym of this, meaning
>one of the phonological building blocks used in a given language or
>languageoid thingy, of which syllables and dingles are particular types:
>this is what "Lego block" would seem most naturally to mean.
>
>If we keep the topographic theme then the second word could be "terrain",
>except that has the flaw in my eyes of not being a very good count noun.
>(Maybe we could spring for a trendy "-eme" word?  "Terreme", "topeme"?)
>To give more examples, the legal terrains in Tokcir were V, CV, VC, and CVVC.
>Alex
Okay, there's an incomplete definition there somewhere, because even the
word "Tokcir" itself clearly contains CVC and VCCV substrings.

There's a line that needs to be drawn somewhere to only have finitely many
"terrains", but I'm not clear on where do we want to put it. The minimal
number of substrings necessary to generate any word is, 'fcors, two: C and
V, but this most likely does not capture any language-specific restrictions.

John Vertical