Re: it's what I do

On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:

> Wow.  Now I understand final features. :-)
Thanks! It's a nifty system, and IMO, rather elegant.

> I am also making a modification to Telek, based on what I read.  I've never
> been satisfied my sequences of long vowel followed by a geminate.  Now that
> I know they are typologically unusual, I'm going to dump them.  I'm going
> to shorten the vowel and keep the geminates moraic.  (Sorry, no mimicking
> Gosiute here.)  I'm also going to keep geminate fricatives. :-)
Hey, ya gotta go where the muse takes you. I have also avoided super
heavy syllables in Tepa, although they may show up under exceptional
circumstances, like encliticization of indefinite/interrogative =tte
to a word ending in a long vowel. The clitic keeps its geminate, and
the host keeps its long vowel, resulting in a super heavy syllable.

> You might be interested to know: I just started a field methods course, and
> we are going to be analyzing Pima.  Should be interesting.  I've read a
> little bit about Papago, so I already know more than I should, but it isn't
> enough to be a problem.  My second foray into Uto-Aztecan languages.
What fun! Piman languages are interesting for all kinds of reasons--
phonetic/-ological (just where do those clusters come from?),
morphological (especially perfective verbs--gotta love truncation!),
and syntactic (2nd position auxiliaries).

Wish I were there.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu