Re: Dragging heavy feet

Jeff Rollin wrote:
> On 10/03/07, T. A. McLeay <conlang@...> wrote:
>> Some languages have a requirement than every (stressed) syllable is
>> heavy, so for instance in Swedish [takk] could be a word, and so could
>> [tA:k], but [tak] can't; it needs an extra mora.
>>
>> Do there exist languages in which *feet* must be heavy so that for
>> instance (assuming initial stress), all of these are valid feet:
>>
>> - takka
>>     MM M    (M represents moraic segments)
Somewhere along the line, an extra space seems to have been added in the
second lines (here and below). The ‘MM M’ should be exactly beneath ‘akka’.

..

> I'm no expert on this, but apart from "tank" these all look Finnish (maybe
> they are Finnish-inspired)? (The fact that "tank" is disallowed is due to a
> restriction on "k" ending a word, and on two consonants ending a word.
These aren’t words, they’re feet. I suspect if I go with this language,
I’ll have a restriction on single-syllable words, so that ‘taak’ and
‘tank’ can’t exist as words, but ‘tanktaaka’ could be a word. (Or maybe
monosyllables will be possible words, but vanishingly rare.)

(The words have no particular relationship to Finnish, it’s just the
simple syllable structure and the vowel & consonant length that does it,
I think.)

> But these are not:
>> * ta
>>     M
>> * taa
>>     MM
>> * tak
>>     MM
>> * taka
>>     M M
...
> These can occur in Finnish, but afaik only in "function" words, which do not
> obey the normal rules (e.g. in English "function words like "to" etc. do not
> normally have primary stress.)
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).

--
Tristan.

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