Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.
| From: | Tommie L Powell <tommiepowell@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, February 6, 2004, 3:14 |
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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.
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