Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

On Thursday 05 February 2004 07:04 pm, Tommie L Powell wrote:
> Responding to me, Pavel Iosad wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > > The English concepts of feet and
> > > metrics cannot be applied to my conlang
> > > but my conlang does have a nice way of
> > > creating rhythmic speech (which I suppose
> > > is what you're really asking for).
> >
> > It isn't specifically English - in fact, Prosodic Morphology is all
> > about feet. And your rule
> >
> > > A 1-syllable stressed word's vowel is
> > > "elongated" (held for an extended period
> > > of time), so that such a word takes as
> > > long to say as a 2-syllable word.
> >
> > Is as good an exmple of PM's binarity principle as any, since it
> > prohibits words of less than a foot...
>
> I (Tommie Powell) reply:
>
> Your point is well taken.
> Now here's the trouble with feet in English:
> Its spondees takes much longer to say than its iambs, and its trochees
> take an intermediate amount of time to say, even though all 3 types of
> feet are 2 syllables long.  This makes normal spoken English far from
> rhythmic, and makes rhythmically identical lines of poetry difficult to
> craft in English.
>
>
Aha!

The song over the first season closing credits of "Gensoumaden Saiyuki"
contains a lot of very strange sounding English, even though the grammar is
mostly fine and most of the pronunciation is no stranger than in other
Japanese songs with  English words in them. I think I just figured out that
the residual oddness is with the scansion.

That particular song assigns notes by voiced morae instead of syllables in
Japanese words (so shinjuru gets 4 different notes: shi-n-ju-ru). They may be
trying to use morae in English, which doesn't quite have them, or just
generally ignoring English stress patterns.

I think they are de-voicing English schwas, too. The preposition 'of' and the
first syllable of 'against' seem exist in a strange sort of quantum state
where they aren't really missing, but don't really have notes either.

I'm going to need to listen to the song again and see if I can figure out more
of what is going on.
--
Elyse Grasso

The World of Cherani Station
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/index.html
Cherani Tradespeech
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/tradespeech.html