Does anyone know of any living languages that have poetry written in meters which are defined by long and short vowels?
What do you mean by “long” and “short” vowels? If it’s just stressed and unstressed, English has that. Or do you mean the duration for which the sound is held, or the shape of the vowel (like the A sounds in “cat” vs. “baby”)?
I’m talking about duration for which the vowel sound is held.
Latin and Sanskrit both have poetic meters determined by vowel length, but I’m not able to think of any modern languages that do off the top of my head. Lemme check…
If you are looking for meters based just on long and short vowels, I think you will have a hard time finding any. All the languages that I know of with quantity-based meters (as opposed to stress-based meters) are based on the concept of ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ syllables, where ‘heavy’ syllables either contain a long vowel or are closed by certain types of consonants.
To give an example from ancient Greek dactylic hexameter, which is a quantity-based meter:
ton d’apamEbomenos prosephE polumEtis odussEUs
- u u | - u u | - u u | - u u | - u u | - u u | - -
The first (ton), third (-nos), and second-to-last (dus) heavy syllables are heavy because they are closed syllables, not because they are long vowels (long vowels are shown in capital letters).
If you want modern examples of quantity-based meters, the Chadic languages Hausa and Bole have them. Here is a discussion of the Bole song style Kona, with a link to a paper which discusses the form in more detail.
I’m looking at “Thai Poetry: A Metrical Analysis” by Apiluck Tumtavitikul in Essays in Tai Linguistics. He identifies several very rigid poetry patterns some of which distinguish between “heavy” and “light” syllables (these refer to vowel duration). The poems are further constraind by rhymes and tones (and tones have mutated just in historic times). For example, one of several patterns he mentions is
HHLHLLLH LLHLHH
HHLHLLLH LLHLHH
Disclaimer: I’m certainly no expert in Thai linguistics. I’d like to know more but Essays in Tai Linguistics was the only English-language Thai linguistics text I saw visiting Bangkok’s largest University book store.
And there’s the ones where you just count syllables (Spanish and Catalan, that I know).
Yeah, light and heavy is what I’m looking for. Talking about vowels was not precise. I’m looking for meters whose patterns rest on syllables which are long/short (heavy/light).
Thanks for the leads with the Chadic and Thai stuff.
Old English used a meter based on the number of strong stresses in a line, not specifically the syllables. Not sure if that falls into what you’re interested in.
Edit: And some modern poets use it today with modern English: Richard Wilbur, for one.
Ideally, I’d like to find a living language that has poetry based on long/short syllables and pays little if any attention to accent in meter.
I work on Classical Latin and Ancient Greek poetry, but am a native English speaker. As such, I more or less can’t avoid adulterating the long/short patterns with inappropriate accents. I find my anglophone mind keeps trying to replace quantity with accent. It’s a long shot, but i thought maybe listening to recordings of poetry based on the long/short syllable alternation might help attune my ear a little.
The Chadic poetry on the website is beautiful, thank you for the link.
There is no shortcut for Latin – always mark your long vowels as though the word is misspelled without them, use the given rules to determine accent, and practice, practice, practice reading them aloud.
As far as timing goes, remember that it is something of an artificial construction in Latin. These days, Latin prosodists are widely considered to have been a little too keen to assert that their language worked like Greek in terms of prosody. But they did apply those conventions euphoniously. They had the benefit of lots of experience speaking and hearing the language. You need to practice, practice, practice reading prose first.
I have a book on ESL that details the kinds of facts about a language that most lend themselves to difficulties for learning English as a second language – including the phonic catalogs of a fair number of languages, and various grammatical quirks. From this information, the difficulties people have become understandable to the point of being predictable, and can thus be better worked through. Here are a few things you should know about English if you’re approaching Latin as a second language:
English does have vowel quantity – it’s just not as pronounced as it was in Attic Greek, and to a lesser extent Latin. But it is an emergent phenomenon of the physical mechanisms of speech. Observe the vowel articulation chart. That diagram represents the physical space of the mouth, with the vowels drawn relative to where the tongue must move to make that vowel. What we call “long vowels” fall around the outer edges of that envelope. Being further from what you might call the “rest state” of the tongue, it takes more work on the part of your tongue to make these sounds. As a by-product of this extra effort, these vowels also tend to be louder and get enunciated for longer. I’m not sure why longer, but it’s a well known phenomenon across languages. It’s as though to make those vowel sounds requires more commitment in general.
So, even in English, it takes longer to say long vowels than short ones. Furthermore, many of the observations made about “length by position” are observable in English as well. It takes longer to pronounce a vowel that is followed by a voiced consonant – one pronounced with the vocal cords vibrating. It takes even longer to pronounce a vowel followed by a nasal consonant – m, n, ng. And that’s just how the length of the vowel is affected by consonants following it. Consonants also take time to enunciate, adding to the overall length of a given syllable. Knowing this, it’s still not practical to try to compose English verse in quantity, but you can at least construct English sentences which allow you to feel the effect you’re looking for in Latin. One example that’s you’ll run into is this English dactylic:
Strawberry strawberry jam
I haven’t tried it out on an oscilloscope (Romans didn’t have them either), but see if you don’t find that it takes as long to say the one syllable “straw” as it does to say the next two: “berry”. That’s the rhythm you’re looking for. Boom ba-da boom ba-da (note that the ‘oo’ is pronounced long, and the a’s are pronounced short).
Now, as you have observed, the accent in English is attracted to long vowels. Really, it’s more like long vowels that are not accented tend to be replaced by short ones over time. But you nonetheless feel an aversion to placing stress on a syllable whose vowel is short, especially when there’s a long vowel nearby where the stress would seem more natural. It’s because accent is a somewhat different, but related, phenomenon in English.
When we express accent on a syllable in English: we say it louder, we say it longer, we say it at a higher pitch. In general. Actually, you may observe that we can also express accent by making that syllable softer than those around it (try whispering one syllable in a word otherwise spoken at normal volume – it gives it prominence) or by speaking it at a lower pitch (as is often done with the “got” in “you’ve got to be kidding me”). Still, in general, accent is these three things all at once: louder, longer, higher pitched. But studies have shown that if you contrive to use only one of these in accent, English speakers still identify the intended stress pretty reliably.
That’s what you’re up against. You must resist your English instincts to lump all sorts of prosodic prominence together. Doing Latin as a Second Language, you really need to work on that before you can hope to jump right to mastering the rhythms of classical Latin poetry. I’ve been putting hours of practice into this every week for the past year, and I can mostly tell you that I know for a fact that it can be done. I have made definite progress. I get tripped up on words like quīnquāgintā. Really, the stress goes on the only vowel that isn’t long? Man, it’s hard to push the word out of my face that way. But if I can do it (on the third try, if I’m concentrating), I believe anybody can.
Ok so.
There are several languages that use quantitative meters today for poetry. Here is a list of the ones I know of: Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Japanese, Finnish, Telugu and several other indian languages.
But I suspect what you’re curious about is what this really sounds like. So here are some links to audio recordings
Click here to hear me recite Ibn Khafāja’s Arabic “Mountain Poem” in the common Ṭawīl meter.
Click here to hear me recite Catullus V in hendecasyllabics using a reconstruction of classical pronunciation of around 50 BC. And go here for the naughtiness of Catullus 16.
Click here to hear me recite a poem by Hafiz in reconstructed classical Persian pronunciation.
Hope this helps
Also, regarding the prosodies of Classical Latin: Latin was (like English) a stress-based language, as are Persian and Arabic. None of this prevents quantitative patterns from emerging. For more on the intricacies of Classical Latin and Greek, I suggest you get your hands on W.S. Allen’s Accent and Rhythm (Cambridge university press, 1973). It’s part of the Cambridge Studies in Linguistics series.
Let me know if I can be of further help