Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

On Thursday, February 5, 2004, at 08:04  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.
Length is not weight, though it may provide good clues. For example, in
Shoshoni there are "overlong" syllables (as John Cowan pointed out)
like the initial syllables of ['a:ttoGo] 'potato bug' or ['o:kka41_0]
'Oquirrh Mountains', but these syllables have the same status in the
language as long syllables without overlength ['no:Bi] 'hill'; both
syllable types are equally "heavy".

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie