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Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

From:Pavel Iosad <edricson@...>
Date:Thursday, February 5, 2004, 19:21
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, thus CV words are impossible (with a few exceptions, such as discourse words, such as Russian _da_ 'yes'). The minimal word is CVC in a language which doesn't distinguish length and CVC or CV: in a length-sensitive language. Now Russian words like _zhmu_ 'I squeeze', _p'ju_ 'I drink', _shju_ 'I sew' do violate the principle, at least seemingly, but that's a different story. Pavel -- Pavel Iosad pavel_iosad@mail.ru Nid byd, byd heb wybodaeth --Welsh saying

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Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>