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Bianca’s out for this episode, so William and I take the opportunity to talk about something she hates so much she wouldn’t let us have a show about it: poetry! Figure out how to choose good poetic devices for your conlang, and how history can affect the complexity of poetry. Also we talk about the amazingly verbless Kēlen.
Top of Show Greeting: Delang
Links and Resources:
- Alliterative Voice
- Meter / Quantitative Verse
- Hausa Poetic Meters
- Haiku are based on morae
- Japanese kigo
Poetry Examples:
Gilgamesh:
On the third day they reached the appointed field.
There the hunter and the ensnarer rested at their seat.
One day, two days, they lurked at the entrance to the well,
where the cattle were accustomed to slake their thirst,
where the creatures of the waters were sporting.
Then [came] Enkidu, whose home was the mountains,
who with gazelles ate herbs,
and with the cattle slaked his thirst,
and with the creatures of the waters rejoiced his heart.
On the third day they reached the appointed field.
There the hunter and the ensnarer rested at their seat.
One day, two days, they lurked at the entrance to the well,
where the cattle were accustomed to slake their thirst,
where the creatures of the waters were sporting.
Then [came] Enkidu, whose home was the mountains,
who with gazelles ate herbs,
and with the cattle slaked his thirst,
and with the creatures of the waters rejoiced his heart.
Biblical antithesis:
A wise son maketh a glad father,
but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.
— Proverbs 10:1
Conlang: Kēlen
Koppa Dasao
Wow! That was strange.
I think you’re right, reading IPA isn’t your strongest side 😉 It was almost like hearing you speak Norwegian, very foreign, but still easily understandable.
Ossicone
George your Norwegian sounds like Chinese. 😛
Koppa Dasao
Oh, he did a good job with /æ æ a ɔ eder/.
Okuno Zankoku
Maybe it’s just that English phonotactics don’t get in the way as much as Norwegian does? I don’t find the sequence difficult as written… but who knows if I sound like anything intelligible <.<
Koppa Dasao
It means “I’m off for a meal”.
admin
It does not sound like Chinese. I don’t think any of those syllables even occurs in Chinese 😛
Ossicone
It sounded like Chinese because of the way you did the syllables I think.
And I have limited experience with Norwegian so I wouldn’t pay any attention to me.
Tom H Chappell
Did you consider the Burmese (? somewhere around there anyway) “climbing” meters, where a particular tone occurs in the first syllable or foot of each line of a particular stanza and also in the last syllable or foot of the first line of the stanza, then the next-to-last syllable or foot of the second line, then the antepenultimate of the third line, and so on until it occurs in the second syllable or foot of the stanza’s last line? Then, the next stanza follows the same pattern with a (usually) different tone.
Anthony Miles
Hi Tom!
Do you have a resource for this “climbing” meter?
Tom H Chappell
Resources on “climbing” poetry in Vietnamese, Burmese, and other languages;
http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/search/web?q=climbing+tone+rhyme+Burmese
http://volecentral.co.uk/vf/luc_bat.htm
http://thewordshop.tripod.com/asian/climbingrhyme.htm
http://thewordshop.tripod.com/forms.html
http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=KnowledgeZone&KnowledgeZoneID=20
An example (IMO a great example!) of a climbing-rhyme poem in English:
http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1589565-To-Be-Horton-the-Elephant
It looks like it’s the rhyme rather than the tone that climbs.
Also it looks like it’s not a kind of meter, but rather, is instead a kind of rhyme.
Here’s something about tone-patterns in poetry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_pattern
but the only example in the article is a bit simpler than the one I remember from my high-school “World Literature” class.
If I remember right, it was a form of pentameter quatrain (each stanza had four lines, each line had five syllables). For each such stanza a particular tone was picked as the “fixed” tone; all syllables with any other tones had “variable” tones.
The four-line pattern was something like this (“F” for fixed-tone, “V” for variable-tone):
F,V,F,V,F
V,F,V,F,V
F,V,V,F,F
V,F,F,V,V
Does anyone know what I might be thinking of?
http://www.jstor.org/pss/611312
has two heptameter quatrain patterns, more along the lines of the Wikipedia article. I don’t have a JSTOR subscription so I can’t see past the first page. Apparently they also talk about 8-line stanzas and about 5-syllable lines.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3818108
is another path to the same journal, but it also requires a subscription. Without the subscription one can see only the abstract.
Anthony Miles
I really enjoy the show and have used some of the episodes to improve my own conlang, although most of the conlang poetry I’ve written is in Toki Pona. One thing I would add to your discussion: conlangers need to try many different forms, but realize that many promising patterns will fail miserably in execution. That is okay.
In terms of resources, I recommend looking at Korean sijo poetry if you’re in love with Haiku. Its pattern of syllable clusters, timed pauses, and thematic structure is too complicated to replicate directly, but it might inspire the conlanger to think differently.
Conlang poetry can be therapeutic if you want to write something that you can’t say in public.
Oh, and I _like_ the Greek Anthology. I recommend it for conlang vocab building.
wm.annis
Oh, I like the Anthology, too. Just not every single poem. 🙂
Anthony Miles
I came across an interesting phenomenon in the Numbami language – it possesses a morphological marker /-a(n)dalawi/ for ideophones. That’s an idea that might work well for conlangs with limited phoneme inventories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbami_language