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Poetry in conlangs, was Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

From:Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...>
Date:Monday, February 9, 2004, 23:25
In my high school English class, we read The Odyssey in a verse translation,
and our teacher remarked that the translation was in iambic pentameter because
English naturally tends to flow into that form.  The original in Greek was in
some other meter (some kind of hexameter?) because that was natural for
ancient Greek.

This inspires some questions for those of you who write poetry in your
conlangs:  have you discovered that any particualar meter seems to work well in your
language?  Can you discover this by some means other than trying to write a
lot of poetry?  Conversely, has anyone ever designed a language with the intent
of making it suitable for a particular poetic form?  How did that work out?

(Sadly, my own languages are not nearly complete enough for me to address
these myself.)

Doug

Replies

Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>