Re: Poetry in conlangs, was Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

Ray Brown scripsit:

> Personally (and I know it's a personal view), I don't think that is such a
> good approach. A language designed for, say, the Classical meters is going
> to enable even a mediocre versifier to churn out hexameter after hexameter
> with even greater regularity than Ovid of old. And pretty boring stuff it'
> s likely to be. I don't think a language designer would've come up with
> the Classical Latin situation where a language adopted a metrical system
> unsuited for it and adapted by exploiting the very difficulties in making
> that adoption.
I think it's useful to distinguish between "easy" and "hard" poetics
for a given language.  All languages have easy poetics, presumably, but
only some have hard ones.  In general, hard poetics are adopted from
other languages that have higher prestige:  Latin's hard poetics come
from Greek, where they are easy, and English's hard poetics (foot-verse,
rhyme) come from Old French, where they were easy.  By contrast, the easy
poetics of English involve 4-stress lines, alliteration, and half-rhyme.
In Old Norse, the hard poetics are a direct development of the easy ones,
by adding stanzaic form, consonance, and rhyme to the shared Germanic
easy poetics.  Finnish poetics (trochaic tetrameter, rhyme) are easy, because
the language is initial-stress and has few vowels.

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