Re: Moraic codas [was Re: 'Yemls Morphology]

--- In conlang@y..., "Thomas R. Wier" <artabanos@M...> wrote:
Nik Taylor wrote:


Oh, well, you didn't say that a speaker's intuitions are being called
into
play. I thought (based on what you wrote) that you were asking whether
someone sitting outside the system, so to speak, analyzing the language
from a theoretical point of view, would be able to predict the
moraicity
I would still say "no", however, because first of all, moraicity is a
theoretical
construct, and is not something that you can just sense with a native
speaker's
intuition:  it needs to be there to explain the data, but that is
sensed only after
much analysis of the language.

        Well, I've never studied this stuff as a linguist, but as a
classicist I have to ask: what about Greco-Latin (and Sanskrit, and
Persian etc.) poetry which is based on a moraic pattern? What about
Japanese which is often written using a system based on morae?
        Granted, not every Japanese speaker is literate, and not every
Greek speaker was Homer, but doesn't the existence of these sorts of
systems show some sort of awareness of the concept?

JDM

> Secondly, and relatedly,  my original points
still hold true:  because underlying representations are themselves
also theoretical
constructs, like moraicity, most people cannot just sense them.   They
are derived
within a theoretical framework because they're needed to explain the
data, not
because they are themselves data.  This means therefore that you still
have to look
at a variety of words, and that one individual word will not be able to
tell you
how many moras a particular word has:  you have to look at the whole
system
before you can make any judgements.

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos
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