Thoughts on lojban prosody

[tbovee@daypoems.net]

As I read about lojban (while not yet learning to speak it), I've been thinking about what lojban prosody would look like. I run a largish poetry website, www.daypoems.net, and so read a lot of poetry in the course of a week.

Rhyme, I think, does not work very well in a language where most words ends in a vowel--there are just too many possible rhymes, there's no challenge, and so the reader is denied the pleasure of hearing a clever rhyme. Rhyming works so well in English precisely because good rhymes are rare in the language's consonant-rich vocabulary. The .i sentence separator introduces an additional source of monotony to any rhyming scheme.

Rhythm, I believe, must be a part of any poetry, since the art by its nature plays with the music of the language. Even supposedly stress-less languages, such as Japanese and Chinese, do in fact have a feeling of rhythm when spoken. Even poems that pretend to discard rhythm do in fact have quite complex internal rhythms to carry them forward from line to line. lojban's bi-syllabic gismu vocabulary would lend a certain monotony to the beat, but so what--rhythm by its nature is repetition. And the cmavo provide an opportunity to break up the dactyls inherent in the gismu.

I wonder, however, if it makes sense to consider lojban a strongly stressed language. Since the aim of lojban is to be culture neutral, and since a large portion of the human race speaks languages that do not recognize stress as a linguistic element, then would it not be better to regard lojban neutral on the question, to be stressed or unstressed according to the speaker's preference?

If, however, one consider stress to be part of lojban, then the language would work well with some variation of the Anglo-Saxon meter: Lines divided into two parts, each part having two stresses but any number of unstressed syllables.

The Anglo-Saxon scheme also uses alliteration as a poetic element, and here, I think, lojban would shine. With each gismu beginning with a consonant, the possibilities are enormous, and since the first, leading consonant, syllable in each gismu is stressed, it would provide the alliterative elements additional punch.

lojban would also work with some strict accentual syllabic meters, although the cmavo would be an enormously complicating factor.

A syllabic count scheme, something like the Japanese haiku and waka, would work nicely with lojban, with its vocabulary of short words. One could pack a lot of imagery into a 5-3-5 syllable count.

A vowel alternation scheme, dividing the vowels into classes (open or closed or short or long or whatever) and requiring the poem to uses these classes according to fixed rules, would perhaps also work. I haven't quite worked out what it would look like, but I find it interesting, perhaps if used in conjunction with one of the rhythmic schemes.

The biggest strength of lojban for poetry, in my opinion, is its ability to form words on the fly. Poetry is foremost about imagery--the most cunning rhymes and clever rhythms cannot save a poem with pedestrian imagery from its pedestrianness. And clever imagery can redeem botched prosody from its flaws.

When I learned Japanese, I was fascinated by the way people and the newspapers formed vocabulary. The Japanese are not just the world's champion language borrowers, they exceed even the Germans speakers in their ability to marry concepts into a single word. They do it by jamming kanji together, and pronouncing the combination with syllables derived from Chinese, the on-yomi, generally one syllable per kanji. Because Japanese is agglutinative, even individual words pronounced the multi-syllabic Japanese way, the kun-yomi, can be combined into single words.

I imagine a lojban poet sitting with a pot of ink and a quill pen joyfully creating word after word, combining gismu with abandon to form concepts unknown before in any dictionary or human mind. When I compare those possibilities with the relatively poor word formation resources in my native tongue, English, I dimly glimpse poetic possibilities that roam beyond what I can now imagine.

And that is why I am excited by lojban, this marvelous theoretical construct that many of you have worked so hard to create.

Best wishes,

Tim Bovee
Herndon, Virginia, U.S.A.