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Re: syllable-word nonalignment

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Sunday, December 14, 2008, 19:44
Alex Fink wrote:


>I had a morphophonological idea while walking to campus the other day. One > might have a language with, say, maximal CVC syllable structure, but in > which typical words are composed of CCV units, which are syllabified by > transferring the initial C of each word into the syllable of the final V > of > the last word: so /ba tgude mdaska lti/ [bat .gu.dem .das.kal .ti] or > whatever.
This is vaguely reminiscent of Leti, a language of the Indonesian Lesser Sundas, except there it operates on final -CVC (e.g. underlying /ulit/ 'skin' > surface _ulti_ in most environments) and the preferred "flow of speech" seems to involve (C)VCCV#(C)CV... sequences. There are some papers to be found on Google, esp. one by Eliz. Hume in the Rutgers Optimality Archive-- but it's full of OT jargon that I personally don't get :-( There's also a recent book-length study (2004) "Leti: a language of Southwest Maluku" by Aone van Englenhoven, a native speaker, that ought to be in the UC library by now. Fascinating. The other thing that occurred to me: Perhaps at an earlier stage, initial clusters required a vowel/schwa to be inserted; then your stage of this language lost that rule, with your outcome as a result. But the question remains, how would your outcome differ from an input of /bat gudem daskal ti/ assuming those are possible words???? Or, what would happen with /baC tgudeC mdaska.../?? ObConlang: My Prevli works somewhat like Leti; but the maximum allowable cluster is 2 C; suffixes that are basically -C all have allomorphs with either a preceding or following vowel .... IIRC.
> > Is there ANADEW for this, or anything like it? Anyone done something like > this in a conlang? > For that matter, is there some theory that says that this sort of thing > shouldn't ever happen? (I don't know what consequences the phonological > word has in practice, but I could well imagine that it might not find this > copacetic.)
Vaguely similar are the cases in Engl. and I think elsewhere, where the initial C of a word gets reassigned to a preceding article-- Engl. "(an) adder" vs. other Germanic _Nader_ etc., or "apron" presumably < French-ish ?naperon, the base still survives in "napkin" and "napery" (and British nappy 'diaper', but that's probably derived < napkin). Also pronunciations like "a napple" and maybe " 'tis(n't) "