Re: [lojban] A lojbanic rhyme schema

[Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 8:27 PM, Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
> While I think this is an interesting idea, at the same time I'm not really
> sure it results in the "sing-song" character of rhyming verse in English.
> However, I am not familiar with rhyme in other languages, except that I know
> that Latin very nearly doesn't have rhyme at all. Occasionally couplet
> authors can pull it off, but Latin primarily depends on rhythm rather than
> rhyme, at least classically.

Medieval Latin rhymes, in ways much like modern languages, but
Classical Latin generally does not.

Old English and Old Norse verse forms are alliterative, and count
stresses rather than worrying about feet as modern English verse forms
do (...hm, now I kinda want to try my hand at preserving that in a
translation of at least the prologue of la .be'ulf.), and prior to
about 1650 Spanish verse forms rhyme in ways that pay no attention to
the consonants but keep the same rhyme going way longer than stricter
rhyme forms as found in modern English and French (and, under their
influence, in most modern Spanish verses). Biblical Hebrew poetry
tends to rely on massive amounts of parallelism, a feature that still
sounds good in translation, rather than anything phonological.

I think this idea is cool, and very Lojbanic, but not really within
the realm of things I call "rhyme." I also think Lojban being
culturally neutral calls for us to use both inherently-Lojbanic things
(like this proposed "jborimni" and things that are unique to Lojban
grammar - while I consider the UI-only Lojban poetry I tried writing
as a teenager juvenile and unexciting, I think attitudinal-rich Lojban
verse still has a lot of potential) and free use of various key
concepts from the poetics of languages and cultures all over the
world. Rhyme, in both the old Spanish assonant variety and the
Anglo-French full rhyme, should be embraced as well, along with
alliteration, hybrid verse forms like the bob-and-wheel of the Middle
English alliterative revival and the strongly rhythmic, unrhymed, and
opaque-metaphor-heavy poetry of myiky'elsym's Ziryroi.

The best way to show us how effective "jborimni" can be is to write
poems that use it. I would love to see it done well, along with many
other kinds of inherently-Lojbanic verse forms as well as Lojban
adaptations of the verse forms used in other languages. For the
latter, I suspect following romance examples will tend to work better
than English ones (though those should work too).

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