Honest? Wow. Didn’t know that; I’m surprised and yet, at the same time, somehow not. Rulers do tend to try and alter reality to suit themselves. Not necessarily always, but there’s always a tendency.
At least I guess that would mean there would be no punishment of “cutting off noses”. I can just see the scene, like in Life of Brian at the stoning, John Cleese being stoned for saying Jehova. “As you have said the forbidden word, your nose shall be - huh? Hey, guys, what are you doing? Come on, let go! What are you - ah, I see, I see, yes, very funny, very funny joke, yes, I get it, you can let go no seriously you can let go nopleasedon’tpleaseDROPTHEKNIFEPLEASENOTTHENOSENOTTHEAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”
So, does the expression “Have a ball” come from the toy, the formal dance party, or a third, unrelated source?
And now I’m wondering, what word holds the record for multiple unrelated origins converging on the same spelling and punctuation… Also, the expression double entendre refers to words or phrases with two different meanings(often one innocent and the other risque, especially when used humorously to get crap past the censors or to add parental bonus that will fly over the head of most younger audiences), but I wonder how far someone has managed to push the level of entendre(e.g. triple, quadruple, quintuple).
Also, how did the musical term for the lowest tonal range end up sharing a spelling with a fish while being pronounced like base? Though it is sometimes funny when my screen reader says it like the fish when the musical term is ment and when it pronounces a certain stock insult as dum bass.
Also, anyone know what English rhyme cluster is the largest… and are there any rhyme clusters that hit every consonant as an initial letter… and are their any rhymes that differe in an initial vowel sound? Because it seems like if words starting with a vowel rhyme with anything, they are the rhyming bit of the word with no initial consonant(e.g. at rhyming with Bat, cat, fat, hat, nat, mat, pat, rat, sat, tat, vat, etc but Eat Iat Oat, and uat don’t even work as nonsense words if you try to make them rhyme, at least not without being ackward).
This might help? Basically, the musical “bass” comes from “bassus” which means “short, low”, and has been used in music to denote the lower register for a very long time. The fish seems to have arrived here via a more complicated process. Another coincidence, it seems.
According to here, the formal dance party. But focusing on the “dance” and the “party” rather than the “formal.” I suspect it had to do with balls probably being very significant entertainment events; whereas we now have streaming and stay home to vegetate and/or throw pizza parties instead.
Each syllable can be broken into three parts: the onset (starting consonants), nucleus (middle vowel), and coda (ending consonants). These parts can be empty, so “at” has no onset, and “blah” has no coda, but every syllable has to have a nucleus. (In fact, instead of defining the “nucleus” as the vowel in the middle, it’s often more convenient in linguistics to define a “vowel” as something that can be a syllable nucleus!)
With this definition, we can say that two words rhyme if the nucleus of the stressed syllable, and everything after it, is the same. So you can have rhymes with different vowels, as long as it’s only vowels before the stressed syllable that are different, like “emotion” and “commotion”. Vowels in the stressed syllable and after need to be the same.
There’s an old joke about the Roman conquest of Gaul. When the legions were finished with their usual killing and enslaving and whatnot, they started trying to communicate with the Gauls to tell them what to do.
Centurion: I need you to go fetch water. Water. Do you understand? Aqua.
Gaul: Oh?
Centurion: Then you need to carry it to the hill. To the hill. To the—ad illum. Have you got that?
Gaul: Oh?
Centurion: The high hill over there. High. Altus. Yes?
Gaul: Oh?
So, the phrase, “Added alliterative appeal” is actually assonance, not alliteration? And while I knew there were poetic forms built on alliteration, it never occurred to me that it could be considered a sibling of rhy.
So, Cat and Fat would be a masculine rhyme but puppy and guppy would be a feminine rhyme?
And in trying to think of trisyllabic rhymes, I realized, there’s a sense in which potion and motion match, but they don’t match with emotion and commotion. All four words rhyme, but motion and potion have the same number of syllables and rhyme on all syllables while commotion and emotion have an extra initial, non-rhyming syllable… though motion matches Emotion and commotion more strongly than potion since all four words have identical final syllables and rhyming pentultimate syllables but motion, commotion, and emotion have identical penultimate syllables…
Hmmm… There’s a potentially interesting word puzzle, form a zig-zagging word chain where the links alternate between similar word beginnings and similar word endings… the simplest form is just to match first and last letters like
cat
bot
boy
toy
toe
ate
ant
dot
dog
cog
Which then loops back to cat, but one could imagine something like trying to make a cycle of trisyllabic words where the front links require identical first syllables and assonant/alliterative middle syllables and the back links require rhyming middle syllables and identical final syllables… no clue if such a cycle exists and I’m not sure I’d be good at finding such links, much less closing the cycle… and not sure if longer or shorter cycles are harder to find.
Looking specifically at Western Europe, we can group poetic traditions loosely into three broad categories.
Latin and Ancient Greek poetry depend on timing. Different syllables take different amounts of time to pronounce, and poetry involves making those timings line up in various complicated rhythms. This is where we get terms like “iamb” and “dactyl”, though in English, we generally use those terms to refer to stress instead of time. (In English, stressed syllables take more time, but in Latin and Ancient Greek, stress and time were separate.)
Romance-language poetry depends on rhyme. Most English-speakers are familiar with this one, since it’s now thoroughly taken over, but it first became prominent when the Romance languages got rid of Latin’s syllable length distinctions. Romance languages tend to have a lot of very similar word endings, so rhyme is the obvious thing to replace it with.
Germanic-language poetry depends on alliteration. Up until the Norman Invasion, this was standard in English, but it also shows up in German, various Nordic languages, and even a handful of languages influenced by Germanic (Welsh, Irish, Finnish).
Cultural forces eventually pushed Germanic alliteration to the wayside and Romance rhyme took over, so now most European languages consider rhyme to be the standard mark of poetry. (Icelandic is the big exception.) But various individual authors have pushed back against this (Milton hated rhyme and thought it was “the Invention of a barbarous Age”, for example), and alliteration is very cool in its own right!
Germanic alliterative meter generally worked something like:
Each line is divided into two halves
Each half should have two main stresses in it
Three of those stressed syllables should have the same onset
The last one should have a different onset
I know someone who was writing modern English poetry in this meter a few years ago; I’ll see if I can dig up some of their videos as examples.
To elaborate on this and on Daniel’s comment about poetry being organized according to timing (Latin/Greek) or stress (in English), consider the following two couplets:
I drank a potion
which caused a big commotion
versus
I’m brewing a potion
to cause a commotion
They both rhyme, but the second couplet also has a matching and consistent pattern of stressed/unstressed syllables, while the first doesn’t and sounds weaker or less catchy as a result. There’s a whole system of terminology to describe different stress patterns, whose only surviving remnant in the popular consciousness is some vague awareness of the concept of “iambic pentameter,” which is a shame because poetry that just tries to rhyme without paying any attention to the rhythm (aka the “prosody” or “metre”) almost always just sounds worse, IMO.
On the subject of rhytmic poetry, I was always particularly enamoured of Poe’s “The Bells”, which is like music in words.
On an interesting coincidence, the latest page of Witch Warp includes what I think is the most musical of Joe England’s songs/poems. It also just comes alive.
On the note of meter, I understand the Green Lantern Oath, its variations, and the Oaths of the other Emotion Spectrum Lantern Corps from DC Comics are mostly written in Iambic tetrameter, and if memory serves, that meter is also sometimes called Heroic verse. Of course, Iambic Pentameter gets the most attention likely in large part because most of Shakespear is written in that meter.
Though my favorite meter is what I, for lack of knowing proper terminology, like to call Haiku meter, inspired by the western conception* of the Japanese poetic form. longer form poetry where either you have trecets with lines of 5-7-5 syllables or 17-syllable lines that can be subdivided in 5-7-5.
*As I understand it, syllable is a bit of a mistranslation of the word the Japanese use to describe the structure of Haiku(I believe the word they use actually refers to individual hiragana or katakana characters, and in a lot of cases, 1 kana is 1 syllable, but there are cases of two kana making one syllable(e.g. Konbanwa would be five symbols written in hiragana ko-n-ba-n-wa, but is only three syllables)), and I understand the Japanese have a tradition of nature imagery in Haiku strong enough that some will insist the nature theme is as vital to the form as the linguistic structure while most English speakers ignore the nature theme aspect if they’re even aware of it.
Japanese is actually more similar to Latin and Ancient Greek than English in its poetic structures!
In English, most syllables take about the same amount of time to pronounce. Stressed ones get more time, and there’s some natural variation, but if you read a block of English iambic pentameters, each line will have just about the same duration.
In Ancient Greek and Japanese, syllables can take very different amounts of time to pronounce. Specifically, syllables can be broken down into morae (singular mora), and each mora gets the same amount of time. In Japanese, a short vowel nucleus is one mora, a long vowel nucleus is two morae, and a coda consonant is one mora. (Onsets don’t take any morae.)
And that’s the basis of traditional haiku: you don’t count syllables, you count morae. Which means a Japanese haiku has even less “room” in it than an English one; they have to be very brief.
Latin and Ancient Greek meters also care about morae in a way that doesn’t really work for English. They’re usually based on a pattern of “heavy” (2+ morae) and “light” (1 mora) syllables, rather than the English stressed and unstressed. Those languages also had stress, like English, but it wasn’t involved in the poetic meter.
Also doesn’t help that Japanese already tends to use more syllables to express the same idea compared to english(take first person pronouns for example, I, my, we, our are all monosyllabic, but the generic Japanese first person pronoun is Watashi, three syllables, you add the particle -no to make it possessive, -tachi to make it plural and add the possessive particle after the -tachi to make it both plural and possessive. There are shorter ways to say some of these, but those are usually more context specific(e.g. Boku means I, but also implies the speaker is a young male, and Futari means we, but is specific to a pair.
And, most kana represent a combination of a onset consonant and a short vowel nucleus, the exceptions being those that represent stand alone voewl nucleli, a coda consonant, or which are used for things like indicating a double consonant or as part of a combination kana… Though to add to confusion, most of the Japanese short vowels are actually homophonic with English long vowels if not necessarily equal in duration and whereas English vowels tend to change pronunciation going from short to long, Japanese has some long vowels that are homophonic with the short vowel, just longer in duration.
But yeah, I’ve seen literal translations of Japanese Haiku into English where the translation is basically a bite of word salad with maybe 7 syllables across all three lines… And Webster help anyone trying to translate Shakespeare’s plays into other languages while preserving the meter, especially if the target language is one with a different natural cadence from English.
On the subject of translating poetry into other languages, I know this won’t mean much to most, but our own dear Fernando Pessoa has superbly translated Poe’s The Raven and Annabel Lee into Portuguese. It is a feat.
Japanese doesn’t have (referential) pronouns. Sort of, anyway. There are certainly words for “me” and “that thing over there,” and you don’t have to repeat the name of something every time you refer to it. In practice, Japanese loves gapping and is aggressively pro-drop, so it’s not as awkward as it may seem at first. Rather, Japanese pronouns act linguistically like nouns: they aren’t a closed class (i.e., new ones pop up all the time), they take modifiers (so you can say the equivalent of “Sad he is trying to learn Japanese”), and they happily violate Principles A, B, and C (which are some mostly-somewhat-universal-ish rules for what sorts of things referential pronouns are allowed to refer to).
Japanese also doesn’t have adjectives, sort of, with a few exceptions. Almost all Japanese adjectives are either morphologically nouns (like the ‘winter’ in ‘winter coat’) or verbs. The latter are even marked for tense, polarity, etc., just like verbs.
Again, sort of. Linguistics is pretty fuzzy. A better explanation might be that pronouns are whatever things are pronoun-like, and Japanese pronouns are just barely pronoun-like enough to qualify; the same holds for adjectives. It’s surprisingly hard to find genuine linguistic universals.
Also, two types of linguistic constructions in English that I’ll mention just because I like their names:
A donkey pronoun is a particular type of referential pronoun whose antecedents are hard to nail down. The classic example is[1] “Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.” The pronoun “it” seems at first to refer back to “donkey", but what donkey are we talking about? It’s not a specific donkey; the one we’re talking about depends on the farmer all the way back at the beginning of the sentence. Pronouns aren’t supposed to escape their scope like that, but I don’t think any native English speakers would find that sentence particularly complicated or remarkable.
A biscuit conditional is a clause that’s set up like a conditional but is actually just a statement of fact. The classic example here is, “If you’re hungry, there are some biscuits on the table.” The biscuits are there whether you’re hungry or not; it’s either just an indirect form for politeness[2] or a conditional along the lines of, “If it’s relevant to you because you’re hungry…” Again, this construction is probably completely unremarkable to native English speakers. (Or, at least, it was till now. Don’t study linguistics; it’ll make you unable to speak your own language.)