![]() This original system was obscured, linguistically and metrically, in later Old English by the shortening of unstressed long vowels, triggering various morphological reanalyses of the effects of high vowel deletion. Both this quantitative system and the preference for precisely bimoraic units receive support from Kaluza's law, an archaic metrical phenomenon in Beowulf which prohibits resolution in secondary metrical ictus if the resulting unit would have more than two moras, and which is sensitive to prehistoric length distinctions. High vowel deletion is therefore best characterized as the deletion of unfooted high vowels in early Old English, initially operating while length in unstressed vowels remained contrastive. The dative singular historically ended with a long vowel, *hēafudǣ, in which the medial *u could not be accommodated within a bimoraic foot: *.fu. At an earlier stage, the nominative-accusative plural *hēafudu could be exhaustively parsed into two precisely bimoraic feet: *. These difficulties arise from attempting to describe the prehistoric Old English process of high vowel deletion on the basis of later Old English phonology. Recent work, especially by Bermúdez-Otero (2005b) and Fulk (2010), has indicated that plural forms like hēafudu are most likely original, but accounting for why the medial *u is preserved in this case form, and not in hēafde, the dative singular of the same word, has remained theoretically problematic. The variable operation of high vowel deletion in Old English has long been a point of difficulty, both descriptively – a prehistoric form like *hēafudu is attested variably as hēafudu, hēafdu, and hēafod – and theoretically. Other theories, which derive metrical structure by bottom-up rules, fail to account for the āryā’s characteristic patterns. This analysis uses Optimality Theory to account for both kinds of patterns and supports recent research that holds partially ranked constraints responsible for gradient patterns in metrical corpora. The prosodic foot is shown to play an important role in the regulation of the āryā’s categorical and gradient patterns. Several new metrical phenomena are identified, and the incidence of syllabic patterns, rhythmic structures, word boundaries, and stress are considered. In this paper the āryā is given a detailed analysis on the basis of the traditional description and the empirical data provided by its use in an early Prakrit anthology, the Sattasaī. Mātrās correspond to the ‘moras’ of modern phonology. ![]() ![]() The traditional description of the gaṇacchandas family of metres of Sanskrit and Prakrit literature, of which the āryā metre is the best known, refers to gaṇas or ‘groups’ of mātrās.
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