Re: CHAT: Importance of stress

Well, the jury seems to be in.

1) VC-avoidance is a strong tendency if not a universal in natlang
syllabification.

What then could account for the amman iar anomaly?

2) Syllabification is independent of morphological boundaries.

What then could be the source of the high morpheme/syllable correlation in
amman iar?

The exact method of word articulation in amman iar was never something that
I consciously created, it merely developed as I spoke and read amman iar to
myself (in fact this is true also of the stress patterns).  Phonology was
never my strong suit nor high on my list of conlang interests.  Morphology
and Syntax always came first with me.  The anomaly, therefore, cannot be
blamed on any perverseness of my creation.  As the world's only amman iar
speaker, I can attest to the reality of this anomaly, however, as well as to
its seeming naturalness to both my tongue and ear.  Hmmm.

amman iar has a very low index of fusion, being highly agglutinative in both
its derivational and inflectional morphology. Although there is some
morphophonetic distortion, derivational and inflection morphemes for the
most part retain morphemic identity.  It had been my intuition that this
morphological independence influenced an articulatory independence evidenced
in the syllabification.  This seems suspect in light of (2) above.

If nothing else, this discussion has illuminated a gaping hole in my
linguistic knowledge.  A cursory search of my rather extensive collection of
linguistics texts turned up very little discussion of syllabification, which
might explain my almost total ignorance in the matter.  An internet search
turned up very little as well and a search at Amazon turned up one
out-of-print text.  I need available references.  Can anyone here provide
any?

Thanks for the enlightening discussion.
David

P.S> I want you all to know that you kept me up half the night carefully
reading every amman iar translation I could find to verify the
syllabification anomaly.  Conclusion...It exists!  But why?

David. E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
dbell@graywizard.net
www.graywizard.net

"irvorisel in villissen ciroinarrion unastil
senil el findien vivas na elieth en errutharth limie"

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards
for they are subtle and quick to anger"
JRRT