Re: poetry

Didier Willis wrote:

> I really love the system used in old Finnish and illustrated in
> the Kalevala (a series of ancient songs collected by the scholar
> Elias Lonnrot -- around 1835, if I remember well): poetry is
> mainly based on assonances and for that purpose it is allowed to
> alter a word, to use rather unusual derivations or even to insert
> meaningless words in the middle of a sentence, in order to get the
> perfect sonority and the correct rhymes.
Nahuatl poetry occasionally did the same sort of thing although its not
clear why.  I have been working (as school allowed) on what are perhaps
the oldest surviving Nahuatl texts and they are full of socalled
vocables, stuck in perhaps for rhythmnic purposes, not just in
sentences, but also in the middle of words.  It can drive you nuts after
a while.

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