Rhythm

[Bruce, Colin]

Hearing Tony Johnson's group's conversation in the Seattle Times and
remembering some of Duane Pasco's songs from Tenas Wawa made me wonder about
the rhythm of different kinds of Wawa.  English has, I don't know the
technical term, what I'll guess is a "semantic" rhythm.  Where all the key
semantic words (to the Anglophone mind) are hit "on" the beat with the extra
words being crammed between beats.

Just as an example all the capitalized words fall on the English Semantic
beat (of course there could be some variation):

     NOW is the TIME for ALL good MEN to COME to the AID of the PARTY.

Many other languages like French (I think), Japanese, Jamaican English and
Maori follow a syllabic rhythm.  Each syllable receiving an equal time
interval.  The two examples of spoken wawa I've heard appear to follow an
English-Semantic rhythm.   I was wondering whether that was because a)
modern CJ speakers come from Anglophone backgrounds b) CJ always had
semantic rhythm or c) cj's other original source languages also had semantic
rhythm.

I had been working on the assumption that a word like qhAta which has a long
or doubled vowel should be counted as having three beats: 2 for the A and
one for the a.

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