# Languages without rhymes



## terredepomme

The Korean poetry has almost no notion of rhyming.(Except for some rap artists) There is probably a phonetical reason to that, since the Korean language is not a heavily tensed language like European or Sinitic languages. Even now when I see rhymes in European-language poetries, I have to try really hard to appreciate its beauty- it doesn't really come naturally to me and it seems even a bit silly to me. Also, Japanese poetry does not have rhymes, as one can discover when reading Haiku.
Now, rhyming is not only a lingustic feature but also a cultural trait- I think ancient Romans didn't rhyme their poetries in Latin. But the fact that this is wide-spread in certain languages and not in others must be explainable by some linguistic traits.
So, what are the major languages out there that do not enjoy rhymes? And what linguistic simliraties do they share?


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## LilianaB

All the languages I know have rhymes, as well as great poetry which rhymes and other poems which do not rhyme. Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, English and Old Baltic languages have rhymes. Sometimes poems which rhyme may sound weird if the rhymes are not properly chosen or not very sophisticated. otherwise rhyming poetry is great, Pushkin being one of the greatest poets whose poetry rhymes. German has great rhymes too, Heine and Goethe, among other poets created rhymed poetry. I do not think any of the Indo-European languages will not have rhymes. I think blank verse is becoming more and more popular even in Indo-European languages. Some other languages use different poetic means of expression such as syncopation and other things; African poetry is among those.


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## jmx

terredepomme said:


> ... the Korean language is not a heavily tensed language like European or Sinitic languages.


What do you mean by 'tensed' ? 





terredepomme said:


> I have to try really hard to appreciate its beauty- it doesn't really come naturally to me and it seems even a bit silly to me.


Some European people find it silly too. I think that the original goal of rhyming was making it easier to remember long texts.





terredepomme said:


> Now, rhyming is not only a lingustic feature but also a cultural trait ... But the fact that this is wide-spread in certain languages and not in others must be explainable by some linguistic traits.


Maybe, but I suspect that cultural tradition is more important here than linguistic traits.


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## mataripis

newly made languages may not have rhymes this time because they are still undergoing in stages of evolving.


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## LilianaB

Which languages would you consider newly made?


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## rayloom

jmartins said:


> What do you mean by 'tensed' ?


I guess it means "heavily conjugated", at least relatively as opposed to Korean in this case.


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## tFighterPilot

mataripis said:


> newly made languages may not have rhymes this time because they are still undergoing in stages of evolving.


You mean Esperanto?


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## djmc

Classical Latin poetry was not rhymed, the Romance languages which derived from Latin are, as is medieval Latin poetry. Rhyme seems to have been introduced into English from French. Anglo-Saxon and much early middle-English verse such as Gawayn and Piers Plowman uses an alliterative verse form. It very much depends on the tradition used. Although languages such as classical Greek, Latin, no doubt Sanscrit can be made to rhyme easily because of declensions, conjugations etc. verse in these languages is not rhymed. I'm not sure one can say that "newly made languages may not have rhymes". All languages are in a state of evolution, I don't think that this makes a difference.


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## Perictione

terredepomme said:


> The Korean poetry has almost no notion of rhyming.(Except for some rap artists) There is probably a phonetical reason to that, since the Korean language is not a heavily tensed language like European or Sinitic languages. Even now when I see rhymes in European-language poetries, I have to try really hard to appreciate its beauty- it doesn't really come naturally to me and it seems even a bit silly to me. Also, Japanese poetry does not have rhymes, as one can discover when reading Haiku.
> Now, rhyming is not only a lingustic feature but also a cultural trait- I think ancient Romans didn't rhyme their poetries in Latin. But the fact that this is wide-spread in certain languages and not in others must be explainable by some linguistic traits.
> So, what are the major languages out there that do not enjoy rhymes? And what linguistic simliraties do they share?



Japanese and Korean languages are somewhat related, am I right? How about Chinese (and its dialect forms)? Is there also no way to rhyme the words?


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## LilianaB

Korean and Japanese, from what I know are not that closely related. Korean is often regarded as an isolated language, and by others as a member of the Altaic family. Japanese belongs to Japonic languages  which is a part of the Altaic languages group. Chinese has many dialects which are Sino-Tibetic languages. Why tense has to have anything to do with rhyming? Some of Chinese poetry rhymes. Japanese poetry is written in meter, a lot of it. What about Korean poetry? I do not think Native American poetry rhymes, it just uses the melody of the language as a chant.


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## sotos

Judging from the Greek, I think that rhyming or no-rhyming is a matter of fashion. Traditional Gr. folk songs do not have rhyme but have prosody (since Homer's time), but modern Gr. songs do have rhyme. Talking about Japanese, I think this culture does not appreciate symmetry in general, whether acoustic or optical, conversely to European culture.


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## LilianaB

Traditional Japanese forms have meter. Haiku is three lines, 5 syllables 7 and 5.


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## Meat

LilianaB said:


> Traditional Japanese forms have meter. Haiku is three lines, 5 syllables 7 and 5.



Not syllables, actually, but moras.


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## LilianaB

For English versions of haikus you would call them syllables. Maybe the Japanese call them moras. For practical reason haiku has a form 5, 7,5 syllables. Morae very in length with regular syllables, but for contemporary purposes this is the form of haiku.


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## Perictione

LilianaB said:


> Korean and Japanese, from what I know are not that closely related. Korean is often regarded as an isolated language, and by others as a member of the Altaic family. Japanese belongs to Japonic languages  which is a part of the Altaic languages group. Chinese has many dialects which are Sino-Tibetic languages. Why tense has to have anything to do with rhyming? Some of Chinese poetry rhymes. Japanese poetry is written in meter, a lot of it. What about Korean poetry? I do not think Native American poetry rhymes, it just uses the melody of the language as a chant.



Nice answer, thanks for that. Yes, now that you mention it, Korean might really be an isolated language, though I remember my students telling me about the Japanese invasion of their homeland. Perhaps this had an effect on their culture? Also when I taught ESL to Korean kids, oddly, poetry never came up. I don't remember anyone showing me Korean poetry at all, come to think of it. This is getting interesting. =)


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## Hulalessar

If I remember correctly what I read years ago in the introduction to _The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, _rhyming is not used in Japanese poetry because it is so easy and accordingly Japanese poets favour other techniques.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> For English versions of haikus you would call them syllables. Maybe the Japanese call them moras.


*We* call them _mora _because the metric unit of Japanese poetry corresponds better to our concept of a mora than to our concept of a syllable. E.g. _Tōkyō_ has for units in Japanese poetry while it has only two Syllables by our definition of the term (_Tō-kyō_) but four morae: _Tō_ = two morae + _kyō_ = two morae.


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## LilianaB

Do you mean in German, Berndf?


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Do you mean in German, Berndf?


No, in European poetry. The mora is an important phonological concept in ancient Greek and Latin as stress patterns depend on the mora-analysis of words.

In poetry and vocal music, the mora is the principal unit of length corresponding to the concept of a beat in music. Let's take e.g. an old English song, "Greensleeves". The music has a 3/4 measure and each measure corresponds to 3 morae were each syllabke has either 1 or 2 morae (the first measure has only 1 beat; two morae=beats syllables are in *bold*; you have to use 15th century pronunciation, some syllable-lengths has changed since then): "A|*las* my|lo-ve you|*do* me|*wrong* to|*cast* me|*off* dis|*court*-eous|*ly* and|....". Some syllables have to be pronounced unnaturally to fit the measure, like _off _as _o-o-ff_ and _ly _as _l-ee-ee._


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## LilianaB

Oh, really ? In US translations of haikus and haikus written in English syllable is the base. I do not know what it is in Japanese because I do not speak that language. This is only related to classical Latin and Greek poetry, and Old English poetry I hope. You do not have in mind contemporary poetry, do you?


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Oh, really ? In US translations of haikus and haikus written in English syllable is the base.


True. It is a free adaptation. The Japanese measure is not syllable based.


LilianaB said:


> You do not have in mind contemporary poetry, do you?


Of course. If you measure modern poetry recitals, stressed syllables are on average twice as long as unstressed ones which corresponds to the ancient Greek system where a foot was not defined as a sequence of stressed and unstressed but of heavy and light syllables; i.e. a iamb foot (˘ ¯), e.g., consists of 3 units of lengths (=_beats_ if sung), a 1-unit and a 2-unit syllable. Here we had a discussion in the German forum about this. #2 contains a recital of a German language Limerick (the voice is mine) and a time measurement which corresponds exactly to what I just said. Unfortunately, the example is a German language Limerick but the timing of English language ones works the same way.

PS: It is true that modern *English *songs often ignore traditional syllable weight. This probably corresponds to the partial loss of phonemicity of vowel length in modern English which makes it easier to vary syllable length as needed by the melody. Look e.g. at the song by Leonard Cohen cited here. which consists of a 3-syllable feet of theoretically 4 morae but the music has a 3/4 meter, i.e. there are as many beats in measure as there are syllables and not morae.


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## LilianaB

Very interesting, thank you. So a stressed syllable would be equivalent to two beats, thus iamb will have three beats. Yes, this is very interesting. I have never thought about it this way. Unfortunately I cannot listen to the file because my media player will not play it, I says the file has been compressed. Can you kindly check it.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Very interesting, thank you. So a stressed syllable would be equivalent to two beats, thus iamb will have three beats. Yes, this is very interesting. I have never thought about it this way. Unfortunately I cannot listen to the file because my media player will not play it, I says the file has been compressed. Can you kindly check it.


It is AAC encoding. iTunes or Realplayer can play it.


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## LilianaB

Thank you. I will try it.


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## terredepomme

Sorry for the confusion, when I said "tensed" I actually meant "accentuated."
So for the english word "accentuated," its accent would be "ac*cen*tuated."
Since this is an important element for rhyming and Korean does not have such characteristics, I figured that it would be one of the reasons why Korean is rhyme-void. Same goes for Japanese, which has a high-low accent but not very important.(I think.) 
Chinese is also heavily accentuated, but in a different way from European languages, since it is a tonal language.


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## rayloom

terredepomme said:


> Sorry for the confusion, when I said "tensed" I actually meant "accentuated."
> So for the english word "accentuated," its accent would be "ac*cen*tuated."
> Since this is an important element for rhyming and Korean does not have such characteristics, I figured that it would be one of the reasons why Korean is rhyme-void. Same goes for Japanese, which has a high-low accent but not very important.(I think.)
> Chinese is also heavily accentuated, but in a different way from European languages, since it is a tonal language.



As berndf was saying, the meter in some languages' poetry is based on mora.
Arabic is also an example on that.  Yet Arabic poetry follows meter and rhyme quite religiously!
So I guess it depends more on tradition and culture, rather than lingusitic or phonological characteristics.


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## Explorer41

terredepomme said:


> The Korean poetry has almost no notion of rhyming.(Except for some rap artists) There is probably a phonetical reason to that, since the Korean language is not a heavily tensed language like European or Sinitic languages. Even now when I see rhymes in European-language poetries, I have to try really hard to appreciate its beauty- it doesn't really come naturally to me and it seems even a bit silly to me.


Well, why do we like them - rhymes, I mean...

I think, it's because we have used to them. They don't sound silly to us, at all. Vladimir Mayakovskiy (more or less I can judge only about Russian poetry, for which rhymes are essential, so I go to speak about it) once noted in his work "Как делать стихи" ("How to Make Poems")* that rhymes make a reader to return to previous lines and therefore are a common means to join lines together - not only those rhymes which appear at ends of lines, but also those inside lines as well. By the way, he gives a very broad definition for rhymes, and states that there are many other means for that purpose; but yet, end vocalic rhymes are the most well seen ones, so that they speak mostly about them.

Russian lyric poetry is like a wheel (now it's my generalisation, as I feel the nature of rhyming poetry). Every new line is a turn of the wheel for some angle, more or less the same, and then the wheel stops for a moment. The wheel whirls, and new ideas stick to it, mixing with that already mentioned. Rhymes join ideas together, like ingredients for food. If a poet is a good cook, then he mixes ingredients rightly, and we get a good poetry; otherwise... err.. no, let's not to speak what happens otherwise. Anyway, each new line is a pulse, more or less well felt (sometimes quite quiet; I'm sorry for the wordgame, it was unintended), and each pulse gives us an additional thought.

Epic poems of Ancient Greeks are another thing - their poetry is an artful narration, its rhytm should be much less a pulsation of thought and more a persistent rotation, and should sound like that... And so they don't have rhymes.

* The name is controversial, I know. The article is good.

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May I ask a more broad question...

What parts of language and texts are essential for understanding and feeling poetry? How can it impact understanding and feeling foreign poetry? How does the tradition matter, the sound of particular language, the common poetic images? Any ideas, observations, conclusions?

For example, for unknown reason I can't understand French poetry. I would not consider it strange, of course; the strange thing is, at the same time I have a feel for English poetry. It makes me wonder what is the difference, maybe it's rhythm of language? I mean, the rhythm of English sounds somehow closer to the Russian one, and my Russian ear recognizes it (but still works with it in other ways, of course), but rejects the French one.


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## LilianaB

Mayakovsky was a great poet, very talented, no matter what his political views were. Perfect rhymes and  the sound of the poem.OT.


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