Re: Dragging heavy feet

On 11/03/07, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
>
> Tristan wrote:
> <<
> Again, '*takanat' would be forbidden just as forbidden as '*taka' by
> these rules as it's not possible to analyse it as consisting of two
> heavy feet (at least, if we assume that unfooted syllables are
> forbidden, and aside from suffixes, a foot consists of a max. two
> syllables. These might not be the rules I finally decide on).
> >>
>
> And snipping the rest.
>
> There doesn't seem to be any linguistic reason that such a language
> should not exist, even if it doesn't happen to.  I think it might
> argue for one type of language over another.  For example, it
> might not make a good agglutinative language:
>
> cat-PLU.-1-POS-PLU-DAT
> "to our two cats"
>
> Assuming that "cat" could, by itself, be a word, and that it could
> also be a word with any one of those affixes, that word would
> be something like:
>
> kaani-nenta-maako-pulaa-nenta-tistu
>
> That'd get a bit wordy.  Unless there was a massive series of
> allomorphy rules, so that, just in case the word *could* exist,
> each affix had a light form and a heavy form:

FWIW, a lot of Australian languages seem to have suffixes which are
exclusively polysyllabic - or at least I don't remember seeing any examples
of monosyllabic ones. Interestingly however, as in my examples from Corbett
(2005) a few days ago, there are Auslangs w/ monosyllabic prefixes.

Jeff
--
Q: What will happen in the Aftermath?

A: Impossible to tell, since we're still in the Beforemath.

http://latedeveloper.org.uk