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Re: Dragging heavy feet

From:Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...>
Date:Sunday, March 11, 2007, 15:28
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