Re: 'Yemls Morphology

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001 06:23:24 -0500, Thomas R. Wier
<artabanos@...> wrote:

>Jeff Jones wrote:
>>
>> I've noticed that it's easier to stress the long syllable, but didn't
>> know if it was considered a universal. I've decided that stress in
>> 'Yemls will be primarily pitch-based, which reduces the problem. Also,
>> most roots will have 3 moras, usually with the first one stressed, and
>> many of these will have long or quasi-long syllables combining the first
>> 2.
>
>I forget:  did you say that your roots are monosyllabic,
If I did, I didn't mean to! One problem, I think, is the term "syllable".
'Yemls uses a "syllabary", meaning one symbol per "syllable". However,
linguistically, this is not a syllable but a mora. On the other hand, my
explanation wasn't meant to be an precise analysis aimed at linguistics
professors (It does need to be rewritten, though -- sorry).

>or do they vary in how many syllables they have?
Most typically, they have 3 _moras_, but some of 2 and a few have only 1.
There will also be some with more than 3. A 2 mora sequence may combine
into a single long _syllable_, or quasi-syllabic unit as I see it, through
both vowel reduction and combination of adjacent vowels. So a 3 "syllable"
word would have either 2 or 3 _syllables_.
A possible exception might be something like {Mst} where ['mOsUtU] is
reduced to [mOst]. This might be considered a single _syllable_ having 3
_moras_. On the other hand, the final [U] may reappear in some phonetic
environments, giving ['mOs.tU]. I think native speakers would hear 2 or
maybe 3, syllables in all cases.

Jeff

>I ask, because a single syllable having three moras is very rare -- but
>again, there are counterexamples, in this case, Finnish and Estonian both
>require such an analysis.
> [An aside:
>One of the reasons my phonology professor didn't like one aspect of my
>analysis of the Wintu stress system was that I assumed that moraicity was
>idiosyncratic (some coda consonants were moraic, others weren't; which
>isn't that unusual, cf. Turkish) but that I also assumed that some
>syllables had three moras. My analysis actually explained the behavior of
>the stresses more accurately, but her point was that it was
>methodologically unsound, which is I suppose a valid point.]
>
>
>Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier