Re: Dragging heavy feet

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:

kaani-n-am-pu-n-tistu
[(kaa.ni).(nam.pu)n.(tis.tu)]

Guess that "n" would be extra metrical...  Or would it matter if
the foot was super-heavy?

-David
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"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

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