Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

On Sunday, February 8, 2004, at 08:18 PM, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Ray Brown :
[snip]
>> I dearly like to have one (or more) of our francophone conlangers
>> enlighten by you and me on French metrics.
>
> I must say this surprises me greatly. I mean, the quantitative metrics
> and stress-based metrics are far more complicated than the French metrics,
>  which are about as simple as you can make, so I fail to see what is
> complicated in French metrics...
I didn't say they were complicated - I hadn't got to grips with them to be
able to comment.  It's probably that I just couldn't believe they were so
simple and expected there to be more to it but never got around to
checking out.  In any case, I'm more incline to give credence to you &
Philippe than what I might read in some book or other (I know I've come
across some _very_ misleading accounts of classical prosody).

> In French length does not exist and stress is not phonemic. As a result,
> all syllables are pronounced with the same length, whether unstressed or
> stressed. And French metrics are based on number of syllables, so simple
> it is!
> The "king" of verses in French is the "alexandrin", which means each
> verse is twelve syllables *exactly*, no more no less. Stress doesn't take
> part of it at all. Other verse forms are named after the number of
> syllables in the verse (another common verse is the "octosyllabe", i.e.
> eight syllables per verse.
Right, so what distinguishes it from prose? I think that's what I've never
really figured out. And I seem to recall reading many years ago something
about a caesura in the middle of the Alexandrin. (Caesurae occur in
classical hexamter & other meters - but I've avoided mentioning them so
far  :)

> In French the terms "syllable" and "foot" are for most purposes
> synonymous.
Right - that's another things that's obviously misled me. I've used both
from stress-based and quantitative verse to feet being composed of two or
more syllables.

> They are different in some cases because "syllable" refers to the written
> thing, while "foot" refers to the spoken thing. With all our silent final
> -e's, this means that words which in writing are two syllables are just
> one syllable in speaking, i.e. one foot. Something like "pierre": stone
> may be syllabified as two syllables "pier-re", but in speaking it's just
> one syllable /pjER/, and thus one foot.
I've known that bit since I learnt French some 50 years ago. Those silent
Es suddenly came alive in songs.

> But that's something that English speaking people should understand,
> their spelling being full of those silent final -e's too :)) .
But our silent Es never come back to life.  They died centuries ago in
both prose, verse and song.

> So once you've understood that French metrics are based on the number of
> syllables in a verse and nothing else, you've understood everything about
> them! No wonder most of French poetry is based on the rhyme rather than
> the rhythm :) .
Yes - is rhyme really the only thing that distinguishes verse from prose?
Was my old headmaster right, then, when he dismissed 'vers libre' as just
"chopped up prose"?

Ray
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