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related to: rules for counting syllables
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The most common metric lengths are the ten-syllable line (décasyllabe), the eight-syllable line (octosyllabe) and the twelve-syllable line . Special syllable counting rules apply to French poetry. A silent or mute "e" counts as a syllable before a consonant, but not before a vowel (where h aspiré counts as a consonant). When it falls at the ...
Syllable structure often interacts with stress or pitch accent. In Latin, for example, stress is regularly determined by syllable weight, a syllable counting as heavy if it has at least one of the following: a long vowel in its nucleus; a diphthong in its nucleus; one or more codas; In each case, the syllable is considered to have two morae.
Furthermore, if the accent lies on the third to last syllable, then one syllable is subtracted from the actual count, having then less poetic syllables than grammatical syllables. Spanish poetry uses poetic licenses, unique to Romance languages, to change the number of syllables by manipulating mainly the vowels in the line.
Syllables ending in a vowel are called open syllables, and those ending in a consonant are called closed syllables. Long syllables are sometimes called heavy and short ones light. Consonants preceding the vowel do not affect quantity. For the above rules to apply the digraphs ch, th, ph, representing single Greek letters, count as one consonant;
A syllable onset (the first consonant or consonants of the syllable) does not represent any mora. The syllable nucleus represents one mora in the case of a short vowel, and two morae in the case of a long vowel or diphthong. Consonants serving as syllable nuclei also represent one mora if short and two if long.
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
An example is in this hendecasyllable (11-syllable line) by Garcilaso de la Vega: Los cabellos que al oro oscurecían. The hair that endarkened the gold. The words que and al form one syllable in counting them because of synalepha. The same thing happens with -ro and os-and so the line has eleven syllables (syllable boundaries are shown by a dot):
Terming a syllable "long by position" is equivalent to noting that the syllable ends with a consonant (a closed syllable), because Latin and Greek speakers in the classical era pronounced a consonant as part of a preceding syllable only when it was followed by other consonants, due to the rules of Greek and Latin syllabification. In a consonant ...