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

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008 11:11:19 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
wrote:
>Clearly "syllable" is the wrong word for me to use.
>
>The idea I had in might might better be expressed as a VCV Lego block for
building words.
>
>--gary
Oh.

You know, the peak-through-trough-to-next-peak unit may deserve a name.

You've used it to good effect in your software to create "random nonsense"
that sounds/looks like a natlang; I've forgotten what you called it, but you
published it on this list sometime ago.

Basically, you took a text or corpus in the natlang in question, and for each of
its words you found the maximal V*C*V* strings (C* being a cluster of 0 or
more consonants bounded on the left and right by either one-or-more vowels
or a word-boundary; V* being clusters of 0 or more vowels bounded on the
left and right by either C* or a word boundary.)
Then you'd select those at random and match them up whenever the last V*
of one was the same as the first V* of the next.

Is that clear enough for you to remember what I'm talking about?
Did I describe it sort-of-correctly?

So, a string of phonemes beginning at (or just after or just before) a sonority
peak, descending in sonority through a sonority trough, then climbing in
sonority again to then next sonority peak (or just after or just before), looks
useful; at least for machine-assisted conlang-generation.

What should we call such an "inverted syllable"?

----------------------------------------------

Mostly when people talk about the constituents of words, they talk about
either syllables or morphemes.  It's not necessarily the case that the concept
of "syllable" makes sense for every language; nor is it necessarily the case
that the concept of "morpheme" makes sense for every language.  But, even
when a language has both "words" and "syllables", it's not necessarily so that
every word is composed of syllables; and even when a language has
both "words" and "morphemes", it's not necessarily the case that every word is
composed of morphemes which are composed of phonemes.

Nevertheless all of those prejudices are usually true, or mostly true, for most
languages.

But VCV (and VVCV and VCCV and VCVV and so on) parts-of-words might also
be useful; in fact, apparently, they are.  Since we won't call them "syllables"
what will we call them?

I guess this is a "Request For Proposals".

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