Alex Fink wrote:


>I had a morphophonological idea while walking to campus the other day.  One
> might have a language with, say, maximal CVC syllable structure, but in
> which typical words are composed of CCV units, which are syllabified by
> transferring the initial C of each word into the syllable of the final V 
> of
> the last word: so /ba tgude mdaska lti/ [bat .gu.dem .das.kal .ti] or
> whatever.

This is vaguely reminiscent of Leti, a language of the Indonesian Lesser 
Sundas, except there it operates on final -CVC (e.g. underlying /ulit/ 
'skin' > surface _ulti_ in most environments) and the preferred "flow of 
speech" seems to involve (C)VCCV#(C)CV... sequences. There are some papers 
to be found on Google, esp. one by Eliz. Hume in the Rutgers Optimality 
Archive-- but it's full of OT jargon that I personally don't get :-( 
There's also a recent book-length study (2004) "Leti: a language of 
Southwest Maluku" by Aone van Englenhoven, a native speaker, that ought to 
be in the UC library by now.  Fascinating.

The other thing that occurred to me:  Perhaps at an earlier stage, initial 
clusters required a vowel/schwa to be inserted; then your stage of this 
language lost that rule, with your outcome as a result. But the question 
remains, how would your outcome differ from an input of /bat gudem daskal 
ti/ assuming those are possible words????  Or, what would happen with /baC 
tgudeC mdaska.../??

ObConlang: My Prevli works somewhat like Leti; but the maximum allowable 
cluster is 2 C; suffixes that are basically -C all have allomorphs with 
either a preceding or following vowel .... IIRC.

>
> Is there ANADEW for this, or anything like it?  Anyone done something like
> this in a conlang?
> For that matter, is there some theory that says that this sort of thing
> shouldn't ever happen?  (I don't know what consequences the phonological
> word has in practice, but I could well imagine that it might not find this
> copacetic.)


Vaguely similar are the cases in Engl. and I think elsewhere, where the 
initial C of a word gets reassigned to a preceding article-- Engl. "(an) 
adder" vs. other Germanic _Nader_ etc., or "apron" presumably < French-ish 
?naperon, the base still survives in "napkin" and "napery" (and British 
nappy 'diaper', but that's probably derived < napkin).  Also pronunciations 
like "a napple" and maybe  " 'tis(n't) "