Languages with Nouns/Adjectives/Verbs of ONLY Two+ Syllables

[Ser]

Are there any languages where all nouns/adjectives/verbs (in all their inflectional forms) have at least two syllables? (Not including numbers, or basic adverbs like "very" and "here/there".) I want to do this in a conlang, but...

Anyway, Old Church Slavonic and Italian seems to be pretty close. As for OCS, only one or two nouns of the Swadesh list have one syllable (kry 'blood', and maybe shie 'neck' but this might have two syllables), and none of the adjectives or verbs does. Italian is better: ALL nouns/adjectives/verbs have at least two syllables in the Swadesh list. Although upon closer examination, I found it does have the words sci 'a ski; skiing' and re 'king' (which IMO should be *regge, like lēgem > legge, too bad).

[----]

Yoruba is an interesting case where verbs overwhelmingly tend to be monosyllables (polysyllabic verbs can almost always be parsed as contractions) but every other word class is obligatorily at least two syllables long except for many grammatical particles and unemphasized pronouns. The minimal form for noun roots is VCV and recently I've done some reading that seems to indicate the situation in Yoruba is a feature it shares with other allegedly related languages.

[zompist]

I expect a lot of languages will come close, but it would be a weird thing if it affected every word. Is there a conspiracy to prevent sound changes, or borrowing, or adaptation of form words into content words, from producing one-syllable nouns?

Quechua comes pretty close, but it does have a handful of one-syllable content words (e.g. kay 'be', riy 'go').

[sangi39]

Aren't most reconstructed stems for Proto-Uralic bisyllabic. I can only remember a couple of monosyllabic roots, but most of the ones I've seen are two syllables long. Granted, though, Proto-Uralic reconstructions have a fairly limited lexicon, so that the best example ever.

[Nortaneous]

The keyword is "prosodic word size", apparently: http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/1028-0409/ ... ER-0-0.PDF

Looks like Maori has it. You might also want to look at Gilbertese.

Some Japonic languages require words to be at least two morae long on the surface level, so one-mora words without suffixes take vowel length.

Nivkh doesn't allow roots *above* two syllables IIRC, but that's different.

[Dewrad]

Anyway, Old Church Slavonic and Italian seems to be pretty close. As for OCS, only one or two nouns of the Swadesh list have one syllable (kry 'blood', and maybe shie 'neck' but this might have two syllables), and none of the adjectives or verbs does. Italian is better: ALL nouns/adjectives/verbs have at least two syllables in the Swadesh list. Although upon closer examination, I found it does have the words sci 'a ski; skiing' and re 'king' (which IMO should be *regge, like lēgem > legge, too bad).

In Italian, plenty of high-frequency verbs are monosyllabic in the 2sg and 3sg present tense, and quite a few in the 1sg as well.

[vokzhen]

Unless OP worded it oddly, I don't think he's counting roots, he's counting words. As a result, many synthetic languages will probably fit for verbs if they don't use the root without any markings for imperatives, reducing it down to whether or not there are monosyllabic nouns that don't take syllabic case affixes. At quick glances, it looks like Inuit, Kutenai, and Makah (Wakashan) might be pretty close to lacking any monosyllabic content words once accounting for inflection, but I don't have anywhere near enough information to say for sure.

[M Mira]

Unless OP worded it oddly, I don't think he's counting roots, he's counting words. As a result, many synthetic languages will probably fit for verbs if they don't use the root without any markings for imperatives, reducing it down to whether or not there are monosyllabic nouns that don't take syllabic case affixes. At quick glances, it looks like Inuit, Kutenai, and Makah (Wakashan) might be pretty close to lacking any monosyllabic content words once accounting for inflection, but I don't have anywhere near enough information to say for sure.

That got me thinking, maybe Japanese verbs fit? IIRC one-syllable forms only occurs with conjunctive and irrealis, neither could stand on its own without further agglutinations.

[Pabappa]

http://aveneca.com/Raritaeten.pdf says Gilbertese requires all words to be at least 3 moras, and many are 4, but that these can be just one actual syllable. Possibly the same is tsrue of relatefd languaghes suich as Marshallese.

[Ser]

I expect a lot of languages will come close, but it would be a weird thing if it affected every word. Is there a conspiracy to prevent sound changes, or borrowing, or adaptation of form words into content words, from producing one-syllable nouns?

Well it seems like I found such a language: Xhosa. According to Xephyr, every noun and adjective must inevitably be at least disyllabic, since every root is always expressed with an affix for such parts-of-speech, never allowing the root to be bare naked. As for verbs, they do have an inflection with the root bare: the imperative, potentially creating monosyllabic inflections. But the "meaningless" suffix yi- is then added to monosyllabic roots for such imperatives, so that these have to have at least two syllables too. If there's a conspiracy involved the Xhosa are in it.

(Coincidentally I had planned something similar for my conlang. All adjectives/nouns/verbs always come with an inflectional affix, which provides an unstressed syllable.)

Some Japonic languages require words to be at least two morae long on the surface level, so one-mora words without suffixes take vowel length.

http://aveneca.com/Raritaeten.pdf says Gilbertese requires all words to be at least 3 moras, and many are 4, but that these can be just one actual syllable. Possibly the same is tsrue of relatefd languaghes suich as Marshallese.

Talking about Japanese, ¡Papapishu! (i.e. vlad) said there are some Japanese dialects that lengthen at least some of the words that are monosyllabic in the standard (e.g. so that ki 'tree' would be kii). Maybe these could count too.

[Tropylium]

Aren't most reconstructed stems for Proto-Uralic bisyllabic. I can only remember a couple of monosyllabic roots, but most of the ones I've seen are two syllables long. Granted, though, Proto-Uralic reconstructions have a fairly limited lexicon, so that the best example ever.

This carries over to the attested languages too though. Western Samic languages generally qualify for this: already all content word stems are at least bisyllabic (though I guess some recent loans may be exceptions). Usually there will be a couple of suffixes on top of this, too.

Finnish and Estonian have the related restriction that all content word stems are at least bimoraic, but this includes cases with long vowels (maa 'earth', puu 'wood' etc.) and, in the latter, words of shape CVCC (linn 'town', must 'black' etc.)

[Ser]

Classical Arabic is another language where all nouns and adjectives must have at least two syllables. Again, it's because all of them must come with a case(+state) marker, and the markers always add an extra syllable at least. It does allow a few monosyllabic masculine singular imperative verbs though (e.g. qul 'speak! [you, a man]').