Re: THEORY: Tepa prosody [was: Estonian Quantity]

En réponse à Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...>:

> Hey.
>
> What follows is best viewed in a monowidth font. It's also rather
> long.
>
But extremely interesting. I'll snip those explanations though, since I know
far too little about this to do anything of it right now :( .

[snip interesting stuff (looks quite oxymoric, doesn't it? :)) )]

>
> As far as I can tell, both realizations are in free variation.
>
> So while Estonian didn't provide a direct model, Prince's analysis of
> overlength as a metrical phenomenon got me thinking about foot-based
> morphophonology in Tepa.
>
Very interesting! In fact, it inspired me for Itakian. Like Tepa, between the
phonemic form and the phonetic realisation of a sequence, there are quite a few
changes (even more then Tepa in fact, many more). In the first version of
Itakian, those changes made the language impossible to remember. A hypothetical
sequence like "ta 'ilce" /ta ?jlke/ made of two words ended up as [dZl=g] (and
I spare you the tone sandhi :) ). Since the writing system was pretty phonemic,
it made the language quite difficult to read (probably more than Tibetan :)) ).
Also, though I thought the idea was neat, at last I was unhappy that the change
rules were so powerful, and I wanted to find a way to make them less powerful,
without losing their peculiarity. I think you've given me an idea, to use
metrical constraints on the rules. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about
this metrical analysis you present (is there anywhere on the web stuff that
explains it? I cannot reach linguistic printed material for now). Also, it
would maybe explain why the grammatical processes of the languages seem to make
it that on the phonemic surface, the only syllables allowed are CV, CL (L
is /n/, /r/, /j/ or /w/, which can behave like consonnants or vowels), CVV, CLV
and CVL (LV syllables exist, but for the analysis, they can be written as 'LV,
where ' is the glottal stop, thus having still a CLV syllable)

>
> Right now it's on my hard drive; Jeffrey Hennings has some stuff on
> his Langmaker.com pages, but for some reason the inflectional
> morphology of nouns and verbs never made it there. I'm still working
> out some changes to the derivational morphology. Once they are done,
> I'm planning on writing up the phonology and morphology and posting
> it here. I'm still thinking about where to get web space; I don't get
> any from BYU for personal pages. I'll probably have to go with a free
> service.
>
As I said, Free is probably the best free service you can find, giving you
100Mb of webspace for free, and without pop-up windows or those damn little
commercial things you normally have to add on your webpages (moreover, you can
in fact get as many account as you want, giving you with each account 100Mb of
webspace, allowing people to have as many webpages as they want). Unfortunately
for about 95% of the people who are on Internet, it's a French service, and it
doesn't seem available for people without an address in France (though I may be
wrong. I got my page while I was still living in France, so I don't have that
problem). As I did with Kristian Jensen, I can provide you with a webpage place
if you want.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.