Re: Insane Question

Hi, Sarah.  Remember that your conlang poetry doesn't necessarily have to
rhyme to be poetic, or even lyrical.  Old English poetry based itself on
beats per line and various patterns of alliteration and stress.
(Alliteration, you know, being the repetition of initial or even medial
consonants).  Old Irish and Middle Welsh poetry employed end and middle
rhymes, but also consonance and assonance (consonant rhyme and vowel rhyme).
Together, these ornaments were called cynghanedd in Welsh.  An example of
consonance is a repeated pattern of initial, medial, and final consonants in
a phrase--oh now I can't think of the famous one by Dylan Thomas, so I'll
just make something up:  Dearest my darkling, drawest my dagger, where the
patterns d/r/st/m/d/k d/r/st/m/d/g are repeated in order.  Teonaht makes
"rhymes" on words that end in ndr and other consonant clusters, so, as in
English: wonder, kinder, blender, thunder, ender, finder, wander, sunder,
pander, and so forth.  Assonance is beautifully expressed in Shakespeare's
sonnet 129:  "...on purpose laid to make the taker mad."  "Laid" and "take"
don't rhyme, but their vowels do.  There is much you can do with the
embellishments of your invented poetry.

For rhymes, oft-used suffixes are always a help.  So, too, is making up a
bunch of words ahead of time that rhyme and thereby increasing your rhyme
pool. <G>  (They don't all have to be "male" rhymes, either.  Off-rhymes or
Irish rhymes can be appealing, too).

And what is the name of that type of poem in which you are allowed about
seven words that you keep repeating finally?  Is it the sestina?  I can
NEVER remember this.  All I know is that it is incredibly hard to write.
What are its requirements?

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."



----- Original Message -----
From: "Sarah Marie Parker-Allen" <lloannna@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, January 27, 2003 4:35 AM
Subject: Re: Insane Question


> Hmmm... that's a good point.  This is why I shouldn't be allowed to write
> anything for public consumption at 4am.
>
> I'm feeling like I need to come up with a language that will make rhyming
> easy.  Seriously, to write up a language that's primarily useful to poets
> and songwriters, and make every other consideration secondary.  I,
frankly,
> stink at making up rhymes in English.  Maybe if there's a buffet approach
to
> affixes... like, several suffixes (suffices?) that will do the same thing
> grammatically, allowed for each group of words.  Six different ways of
> indicating the genitive case, all of which are equally valid for any noun.
> Hmm.  Hard to memorize, with way too much diversity for day-to-day
> conversations, but perfect for rhyming.  And every suffix will have at
least
> two or three syllables, so that they'll ALL rhyme all the time.
>
> BTW, thanks for the link.  All my grammar books are for Russian (Though
> there's a particularly helpful one called "English Grammar for Students of
> Russian," it's in a box in my mother's basement in Ohio at the moment).
>
> Sarah Marie Parker-Allen
> lloannna@surfside.net
> http://www.geocities.com/lloannna.geo
> http://lloannna.blogspot.com
>
> "Give 'em the old flim flam flummox;
> Fool and fracture 'em;
> How can they hear the truth above the roar?"
> -- Razzle Dazzle/Chicago
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > Behalf Of Tristan
>
> > I beg to differ: 'killing' and 'throwing' don't rhyme. 'Stealing' and
> > 'feeling' only rhyme by grace of the root. (The same does not apply to
> > -ations though.)
>
> ---
> [This E-mail scanned for viruses by SURFSIDE INTERNET]
>

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