> I am particularly interested the way moraicity is used as an 
> explanation in this paper. I am familiar enough with moraicity in 
> ancient Greek (and _Classical_ Latin) prosody, and from Japanese - but 
> this seems, shall we say, a bit different    ;)
>
Yes, the limitation to 4 morae suggested for roots (and what counts as a 
morae) seem truly weird. I'm more tempted than ever to make my own evil 
lang with such screwyness, but I really shouldn't abandon my project in 
progress. Perhaps later....

>
> Yes, which goes counter to the idea that a pronounceable 'word' must 
> have a least one syllable. But then I am reminded of what Crystal 
> write about 'syllable':
> "Providing a precise definition of syllable is not an easy task, and 
> there are several theories in both phonetics and phonology......."
> [A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics]
>
> So arguably whether xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłs has any syllables or not will depend 
> upon one's definition of 'syllable'.
>
Yes, that seems to be a problem to me too: I think I tend towards the 
opinion that syllables are not language independent entities, but rather 
simply structures that may (or may not) be useful in a language 
dependent way to describe word structure. The problem with saying 
they're language depending and may not be relevant in all cases though 
is illustrated by the problems posed by extra-syllabic consonants and 
the patch job solutions, and all the awkwardness caused when assumptions 
about the shared structural properties of languages fail. I tend to take 
a more descriptivist view of things: I'd use a concept if it works for 
describing a particular language or makes that language easier to 
describe, and discard it if it doesn't. I'm really not that interested 
in Chomsky style theories which are too abstracted from the actual data, 
since in my experience as a mathematician (well, a student 
mathematician) it's not a brilliant idea to build massive complex 
extremely abstracted theories which your data may not support then try 
to claim that your theories always work or are in some way universal.

> The comment on obstruents is also interesting. Indeed Pike's 
> definition of vocoids would seem to exclude fricatives. But AFAIK 
> voiced fricatives can and do act as syllabic nuclei in some languages 
> so, presumably, should be classed as vocoids. But cannot voiceless 
> fricatives also act as syllabic nuclei? The nucleus of the exclamation 
> 'pst!' is surely [s]. IIRC it has been posited that Etruscan allowed 
> /s/ and /f/ to serve as syllabic nuclei - but of course we have no way 
> of checking (without time travel). Are there examples in actual spoken 
> languages (besides, of course, interjections like 'pst')?
>
I'm sure I've heard of other still living languages which allowed 
syllabic s, but at the moment I can't think which ones they are.


>
> Certain consonants can - and not uncommonly do - form syllabic nuclei. 
> How this relates to Bella Coola would be too presumptive of me to say, 
> as I know next to nothing about the language and have never heard it 
> spoken. There does seem to be some case for extrasyllabicity, but 
> fundamentally one needs to define syllabicity first. And there does 
> not seem to be agreement among either phonologists or phoneticians 
> about the precise definition of 'syllable'
>
The problem I think with Bella Coola is that there seem to be no 
restrictions whasoever in the clusters for the most part. There is no 
restriction as far as I can tell forbidding words like:

k'p't' [k_>p_>t_>]

or, to take an example from a language called Klamath,

gank@nktktdamna

with long sequences of stops. In order to explain the structure of such 
words using syllabic consonants, you would have to allow pretty much 
every consonant to be syllabic, and if you do that then what've you 
basically done is seriously reduced if not destroyed entirely any 
benefit to be gained from even talking about syllables.
 Anyway, I agree with you that there are problems in defining syllables. 
As I said, I think the problem is the assumption that they need to be 
defined language independently in the first place.

>> Do you think that an analysis that says that xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłs has no 
>> syllables is correct?
>
>
> I remain to be convinced    :)
>
So do I. My intuition insists that every word should have at least one 
syllable, but I'm thinking more and more that I've got the wrong idea 
about syllables more than anything, and my intuition about how English 
(and the other languages I speak) work is misleading me. So, I guess you 
could say I'm more and more tempted to agree.