Re: Rhyming Conlangs

Dear Ciege,

You're asking two questions:   one about rhymes and the other about poetry.

Making rhymes:    Though I know of one conlanger who used Word Net to
generate an artificial lexicon of hundreds of thousands of words, most
artificial vocabularies tend to be smaller than natural ones, and this can
create fewer opportunities for words to rhyme by conincidence.

In a small artificial vocabulary---say, a few thousand words---you can
increase the number of rhyming words by restricting final sounds to vowels,
and by giving lots of words the same stress pattern.   (True, you could have
a few final consonants, like m, n, and N in Chinese, but the fewer the
better if you want lots of rhymes.)

Making poetry:    You don't necessarily need rhymes to make poetry.   Even
if the verse isn't free, its structure can rest on something other than
rhyme:   e.g.   number of syllables per line, as in haiku;   stress patterns
as in blank verse;   semantic devices like parallelisms, which I've heard
were used in the Bible's poetry, or at least some of it.

Aside:    It's conceivable that a language community could use rhymes only
in mnemonics, and use non-rhyming patterns in its more serious poetry,
though I know of no real-life precidents for this.

:-)

Jim



From:  Ciege Engine <mkinjubhy@Y...>
Date:  Mon Oct 8, 2001  2:08 am
Subject:  Rhyming Conlangs

What, if anything specific, does a language need to rhyme/make poetry?

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