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Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Thursday, February 5, 2004, 6:11
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 =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com (home) raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk (work) =============================================== "A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language." J.G. Hamann, 1760