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

On Fri, 7 Nov 2008 08:45:07 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>--- On Fri, 11/7/08, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
[...]
>> 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".
>
>[...]
>I checked the thesaurus for "valley" and came up with:
>glen, dale, dell, vale, dingle, hollow, coomb (coombe, combe, comb),
>cirque, corrie, cwm (Welsh), strath (Scots), trough, notch, coulee,
>ravine, gully, gorge, canyon, gulch, arroyo, gap, chasm, abyss,
>break, crevice, crevasse
>
>I kind of like "dingle".
I think there are two words wanting here.  One is the word for a chunk of
shape C*V*C* (a valley, or dingle).  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.
The terrains of Ceqli are L*F*: L (leaders) are obstruents, F (followers)
nonobstruents, both vocalic and consonantal.
There are several games which one might say work in terms of terrains:
planet names in Elite and scroll etc. names in several classic roguelikes
are generated by chaining together random strings from a fixed set, which
didn't have much to do with syllables although they were of about the right
length.

Alex