Re: Tone Rhyme (was: POETRY/TRANS.: 2 poems & "googogigglabyte")

On Wed, 17 Jul 2002 18:50:01 -0400 Muke Tever
<alrivera@...> writes:
> From: Steg Belsky
> >Hmmm... talking of Chinese poetry, does anyone know
> >if there's such a thing as "tone rhyme" in tone (static
> >or contour) languages?  So, for instance, instead of
> >rhyming lines by having them end in the same sequence
> >of consonants and/or vowels, they would end in the same
> >sequence of tones?
> Would this be much different from meter in English?
>     *Muke!
-

Well, meter tracks stress, right?  The kind of system i'm thinking of
would be tracking the pitches of the tones.  So instead of having a meter
system that looks like this, for instance:

---!---!---!--

You could have a tone-based rhyme couplet that goes:

.......(something)....../\~
.......(something)....../\~

Or, something closer to meter would be a poetic system based on tone
tunes, so for instance each line needed to follow a pattern like:

\__/~//\~_\\

or something.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "there is darkness all around us"