Re: quantitative meter, accent and verse form

Wm Annis:
>         I'm curious to know:
>             1) if anyone has created any languages where vowel
> quantity is significant;
>             2) if so, was stress or pitch accent employed, or none at
> all; and finally
>             3) has anyone tried to work with formal verse forms in
> their constructed languages?  Successfully?
Livagian until recently had a contrast between single and double
length vowels. It is a tone language that can easily be analysed
(misanalysed, in my view) as pitch accent. I had elaborated in some
detail its formal verse forms, one ingredient of which was metre.
Essentially, the metrical rules equated tonic syllables/moras (i.e.
those bearing H(L) or HLH tone, as opposed to L tone) with stressed
syllables and then formalized my nonstandard theories of English
metrics.

However, I, through various devices, abolished double length vowels
at the phonological level, because I found them insufficiently
contrastive with single lengths in tonic syllables. If a H(L)
tone was realized as HL, it was too hard to tell if the vowel was
single or double. Double vowel with HLH, realized as HLHL was hard
to distinguish from a sequence of HL HL (where there is a null
onset in the second syllable, and the two syllables have the same
vowel). And a single vowel with HLH tended to have the same duration
as a double vowel with H(L). Although devices existed to make the
contrasts unambiguous, I felt them insufficiently robust, so out
went the double length.

Once I tried applying the metrical rules to actual verse, though,
I became possessed of a sense that the metrical collapsing of the
H(L):HLH was wrong, and that in fact at a metrical level HLH
counted for double the value of a H(L) or a L. The result was
that it was no longer possible for me to apply my anglophone
intuitions and sensibilities to the metrics, and that instead I
seemed to be looking at a quantitative system of metre in some
sense. Since I have no feel whatever for quantitative metres, and
no intellectual understanding of them except at an inadequately
superficial level, I concluded that Livagian metrics would have
to be discovered rather than invented, and that my command of
the language is way to poor for me to hope to be able to discover
them, for the time being.

I think that lesson is an important one: it's all very well to
invent a metrical system for one's conlang, but if one's conlang
is a living breathing organism with a life of its own, then its
true poetic forms have to be discovered through poetic exploration
and experiment.

> wm,
> wondering suddenly if the tolklang people ever looked closely at elven
> meters
There is a chapter on the subject in the book edited by Carl Hostetter
& Verlyn Flieger. I forget its title, but a search on Google for those
two names should drag up the reference.

--And.