Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

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, foot heads, foot building, extra-metrical syllables,
prosodic word headedness, boundedness...  I just want some ideas."

I (Tommie Powell) respond:

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's an "isolating" conlang (no affixes on any words).
Each syllable is one consonant sound followed by one vowel sound.
Each syllable is stressed or not.
Each word is one or two syllables long.
In each 2-syllable word, only the first syllable is stressed.
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.
No 1-syllable unstressed word can directly follow another.  (That's an
automatic consequence of their grammatical  functions.)
There are two sets of vowels.  Vowels from one set are used only in
stressed syllables, and vowels from the other set are used only in
unstressed syllables.

Taken together, those rules make it extremely easy to create lines of
poetry that are rhythmically identical.
.

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