Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:32 pmSome languages (French, Italian, Japanese), it might be worth noting, are better at rhyming than others (English); note that both French and Italian also have traditionally rhyming poetry, while English has (or it might be better to say that Old English had) traditionally alliterative poetry.
Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:34 amTerminally, it seems to be mostly ignored, though usual reconstructed pronunciation tends to involve reading it aloud; I suspect, however, Chaucer himself might've pronounced
madame Eglantyne without either terminal -e, as it scans better; at least the one in
madame was probably eclipsed by the following vowel, as was that in
Nonne, owing to the following article;
service is certainly trisyllabic, however. Middle English most certainly inherited rhyme from French, but it's been very persistent in English, probably because it isn't all that easy to do in a very creative way, as one might expect from a language with a huge phoneme inventory and fairly loose constraints on where the sounds can go.
Rap and fairy tales are often up to the brim full of rhyme though, and used in interesting ways. Also some pre-modern verse, e.g. Alexander Pope's version of the Aeneid. If creative rhyming is hard in English, does that means rappers are better poets than the alleged poets?
(
Here is a fun article that elaborates on this. The author thinks rhyming is unpopular in English, especially now, because it is "liked by the wrong people"...)
Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:34 am(This is a later addendum: With some further research, the Wikipedia article on Rhyme seems to suggest it was partly introduced from Arabic, through Spain, which I had not heard before. It seems to have also developed independently in Ireland, and there seems to be some contention over which was the source (I might even guess it was both converging). I wish I could comment further on that, but I don't know either Old Irish or Classical Arabic at all.)
Yeah, the Wikipedia article on the less prestigious
rajaz poetry says it developed rhyme pretty early on around the 6th century (and has a nice example too!!). I remember once reading an article on this that specified it was assonance, not consonance... It's disturbing to think Ireland and the Arabic world may have developed rhyme independently around the same time(?) and then did a two-front attack into Western Europe...
Nortaneous wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 12:47 amWhen rhyming poetry emerged in Europe, was it popularized by languages with final stress? Modern French has final stress, but had the Occitan of the troubadours or whatever undergone apocope yet? Presumably everyone else imitated the troubadours.
Both assonance and consonance predate the Old Occitan trobadors though... It's there pretty early in Irish Latin as Wikipedia says (e.g. the
Altus Prosator poem from the 6th century, with some consonance), and out of Ireland, the WP article "
Leonine verse" has an 8th-century English example with consonance... In the continent, in Romance, it's there in the
Sequence of St. Eulalia (9th century, assonance, early Old French), and I
imagine there are somewhat older Latin poems in the West with rhyme...
I find it curious how the Sequence shows assonance by being rather loose with the consonants, yet it's not full-blown assonance either, as the poetry tries to have at least similar consonants. Check out the text, with maksimjɛn - pai̯jɛns (ɛ + nasal), and konseʎɛrs - tsjɛl - prei̯jɛr (=ɛ + liquid), but also mɛrtsiθ - vənir (outright assonance) (all words are stressed on the last syllable).
bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Mar 01, 2021 10:13 pmActually, now that you’ve mentioned it, do you know of any good list of
phonetic transcriptions of Standard Mandarin rhymes? (Preferably with Pinyin transcriptions, though I don’t mind particularly.) I was trying to find one just the other day, but I couldn’t find any good list, and the ones that I found all disagreed with each other — I suspect they were trying to transcribe the rhymes phonemically rather than phonetically.
No, but I can give you one right now—there's only so many rhymes. Do ask any questions you have about disagreements with other sources.
(sh)i [ɨ]~[ʐ̩]
(s)i [ɨ]~[z̩]
(x)i [ i]
ing [iŋ]
in [in]~[iə̯n]
e [ə]~[ɘʌ̯]
eng [əŋ]
en [ən]
un [wən] (e.g. gun [kwən], lun [lwən])
ie [jɛ]~[iɛ̯]
üe [ɥɛ]~[yɛ̯]
Note: these [-ə-] are often written "[ɤ]", intended to be mid, not mid-high.
ai ei ao ou [aɪ eɪ ɑɔ̯ ɔʊ]
uai ui iao iu [waɪ weɪ jɑɔ̯ jɔʊ] (e.g. gui [kweɪ], liu [ljɔʊ])
Yes, there's a good reason why it's -ao and not -au... In fact, the diphthong is so back and low I often seem to, perhaps falsely, hear -ao simply as [ɑ]~[ɒ], and -iao as [jɔ].
a [a]
ia [ja]~[ia̯]
ua [wa]
ang [ɑŋ]
iang [jɑŋ]~[iɑ̯ŋ]
uang [wɑŋ]
an [æn]
wan [wæn]
üan [ɥæn]~[yæ̯n]~[ɥɛn]
ian [jɛn]~[iɛ̯n]
uo (b)o [wɔ]~[uɔ̯] (e.g. po [pʰwɔ], duo [twɔ])
ong [ʊŋ]
iong [jʊŋ]~[iu̯ŋ]
ü (x)u [y]
ün (x)un [yn]~[yə̯n]
Erhua, i.e. the -r [ɹ] suffix generally centralizes or backs front vowels and makes various mergers among these rhymes. Notably, -n tends to simply be dropped, jin+r [tɕiɹ]~[tɕiəɹ], wan+r [wɑɹ], sounding as homophones of ji+r and wa+r, and -ŋ leaves nasalization behind, e.g. xiong+r [ɕjʊ̃ɹ].