Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

On Wednesday, February 4, 2004, at 04:54 PM, David Peterson wrote:

> This is going to be a very vague question, but has anyone's phonology
> done something specifically with feet and metrics?  This would involve
> secondary stress,
Only if you restricts metrics to stressed based rhythms of English verse
and other similar stressed based
verse forms.

Stress, whether primary or secondary, is irrelevant to moraic based
metrics of, e.g. Classical
Greek and Latin.

> foot heads, foot building, extra-metrical syllables, prosodic word
> headedness, boundedness...  I just want some ideas.
The trouble is, as I see it, there simply isn't any universal form of
metrics. Metrical systems
arise largely from the structure of the language itself (but there are odd
exceptions like Classical
Latin which imitated the Greek forms which well suited ancient Greek but
sat rather easily on
Latin).

One could design a language that would be well suited for a particular
type of metrics.  Quenya,
for example, is well suited for the ancient Greek/Latin meters.

Maurizio Gavioli did have the metric possibilities of Kinya in mind and
Appendix B of his site is
intended to give an account of Kinya metrics.  When I last looked was not
there; but that was quite
a while ago. Unfortunately, I don't have the URL of the site - but Google
should find it quickly
enough.

Ray
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