Linguists and Polyglot Mefites: How does grammer affect poems & lyrics?
October 30, 2024 8:20 AM Subscribe
Does the grammer fluidity of a language have an obvious affect on poetry and culture? English is famously fluid in its sentence structure, being a bit of a mutt. But being clever in verse is revered universally. Do certain languages present special challenges, and how does that shape art and culture?
I studied German for a bit, and the strict grammatical rules (compared to English) must lead to tougher choices for poets, especial when working in verse. Writing lyrics, especially, strikes me as interestingly restrictive when I think of German grammer and even rhyme. It also occurs to me that Japanese, with its inflection-based meaning, must influence the way rhyming songs can be sung. I spend a lot of time trying to cram ideas into lyrical structure, and I sometimes wonder if I'm working on easy mode. No doubt, cultural traditions spring up around languages that work differently, but I'm interested to know about how they work. And how do they influence a cosmopolitan society? Also, any good media on the subject to suggest?
[ps. I studied English, but most of my favorite authors are non-English writers. I deeply venerate the creators of good interpretations/translations]
I studied German for a bit, and the strict grammatical rules (compared to English) must lead to tougher choices for poets, especial when working in verse. Writing lyrics, especially, strikes me as interestingly restrictive when I think of German grammer and even rhyme. It also occurs to me that Japanese, with its inflection-based meaning, must influence the way rhyming songs can be sung. I spend a lot of time trying to cram ideas into lyrical structure, and I sometimes wonder if I'm working on easy mode. No doubt, cultural traditions spring up around languages that work differently, but I'm interested to know about how they work. And how do they influence a cosmopolitan society? Also, any good media on the subject to suggest?
[ps. I studied English, but most of my favorite authors are non-English writers. I deeply venerate the creators of good interpretations/translations]
This is more a prosody thing than a grammar thing, but a 5 syllable - 7 syllable - 5 syllable structure sounds really different in Japanese as opposed to English, so much so that I wish we didn't teach kids in American elementary schools that a haiku is a poem that goes 5 syllables - 7 syllables - 5 syllables.
A lot of Japanese pop songs just don't rhyme at all. They might do some interesting things with consonance and assonance, especially in hip-hop (the amount I know about Japanese hip-hop wouldn't fill a thimble, so take this with a grain of salt), but there's a lot less emphasis on rhyme than there is in English-language pop music.
One thing that's a bit interesting about Japanese pop music is that in Japanese, the subject of a sentence can be implicit rather than overt. This means that there are a lot of Japanese love songs without an "I" or a "you," and there are definitely times when the lack of an overt subject creates some purposeful ambiguity that would be much harder in an English translation.
posted by Jeanne at 8:54 AM on October 30 [5 favorites]
A lot of Japanese pop songs just don't rhyme at all. They might do some interesting things with consonance and assonance, especially in hip-hop (the amount I know about Japanese hip-hop wouldn't fill a thimble, so take this with a grain of salt), but there's a lot less emphasis on rhyme than there is in English-language pop music.
One thing that's a bit interesting about Japanese pop music is that in Japanese, the subject of a sentence can be implicit rather than overt. This means that there are a lot of Japanese love songs without an "I" or a "you," and there are definitely times when the lack of an overt subject creates some purposeful ambiguity that would be much harder in an English translation.
posted by Jeanne at 8:54 AM on October 30 [5 favorites]
I think the contrast between ancient Greek and Roman poetry illustrates some of what you are saying, but also illustrates how hard it is to quantify the relative importance of different features of the each language and (as you put it) culture.
If you look at the the Homeric poems on the one hand and the Aeneid on the other, the differences related to language and grammar seem pretty obvious. Homeric Greek encompasses centuries of linguistic development with various historical layers that have been laid down in oral recitation for a long period before they were written. The work of Vergil and his contemporaries mimics that effect, but it's a much different kind of poetry, written for a very time and place-specific (and relatively small) audience, unlike the oral tradition of Homer. To me, the resulting differences jump off the page. The poetry of Vergil is a very in-group kind of writing, and it depends a great deal on subtext. I think also, it is much more common for Latin words to appear simple but have multiple meanings, which again contributes to the feeling that a lot of what a poem is conveying is in subtext. Greek is (to me at least) more precise, partly due to having more moving parts such as compound words and particles. This doesn't mean the Greek poets were incapable of ambiguity-- far from it!-- but it's a different kind of ambiguity.
posted by BibiRose at 9:03 AM on October 30 [3 favorites]
If you look at the the Homeric poems on the one hand and the Aeneid on the other, the differences related to language and grammar seem pretty obvious. Homeric Greek encompasses centuries of linguistic development with various historical layers that have been laid down in oral recitation for a long period before they were written. The work of Vergil and his contemporaries mimics that effect, but it's a much different kind of poetry, written for a very time and place-specific (and relatively small) audience, unlike the oral tradition of Homer. To me, the resulting differences jump off the page. The poetry of Vergil is a very in-group kind of writing, and it depends a great deal on subtext. I think also, it is much more common for Latin words to appear simple but have multiple meanings, which again contributes to the feeling that a lot of what a poem is conveying is in subtext. Greek is (to me at least) more precise, partly due to having more moving parts such as compound words and particles. This doesn't mean the Greek poets were incapable of ambiguity-- far from it!-- but it's a different kind of ambiguity.
posted by BibiRose at 9:03 AM on October 30 [3 favorites]
Sort of yes. You can look at English poetry and how it's changed over time for a bit of an example.
Old English poetry is structured around (1) alliteration, and (2) a certain number of stressed syllables (2) per half-line. Old English was more like German, in that it was highly inflected (case, gender, etc.), which also meant (a) more flexible word order, and (b) fewer little words like prepositions. So it's a lot easier to cram a lot of meaning in to a few words. Words were also shorter, which made them easier to fit into the half lines.
As Old English morphed into Middle English and then Modern English, and some of these things changes (inflectional forms were lost, more prepositions were used, French words were introduced into the vocabulary which were longer, word order got stricter) the poetic forms shifted in response: you get a move towards longer verse lines, with syllable counting (e.g., iambic pentameter), and rhyming as the organizational structure.
But! In the Middle English period, people did still imitate older verse forms, and folks like JRR Tolkein wrote Old English style verse in Modern English. So, it's more like the particular structure of a language might lend itself to particular types of verse structures, but there aren't hard and fast rules.
posted by damayanti at 9:56 AM on October 30 [2 favorites]
Old English poetry is structured around (1) alliteration, and (2) a certain number of stressed syllables (2) per half-line. Old English was more like German, in that it was highly inflected (case, gender, etc.), which also meant (a) more flexible word order, and (b) fewer little words like prepositions. So it's a lot easier to cram a lot of meaning in to a few words. Words were also shorter, which made them easier to fit into the half lines.
As Old English morphed into Middle English and then Modern English, and some of these things changes (inflectional forms were lost, more prepositions were used, French words were introduced into the vocabulary which were longer, word order got stricter) the poetic forms shifted in response: you get a move towards longer verse lines, with syllable counting (e.g., iambic pentameter), and rhyming as the organizational structure.
But! In the Middle English period, people did still imitate older verse forms, and folks like JRR Tolkein wrote Old English style verse in Modern English. So, it's more like the particular structure of a language might lend itself to particular types of verse structures, but there aren't hard and fast rules.
posted by damayanti at 9:56 AM on October 30 [2 favorites]
English is famously fluid in its sentence structure
If you mean word order I would actually disagree. A lot of languages are much more flexible there, often because they use other mechanisms for things that English uses word order to do (like determining the subject or object of a verb).
posted by trig at 10:05 AM on October 30 [2 favorites]
If you mean word order I would actually disagree. A lot of languages are much more flexible there, often because they use other mechanisms for things that English uses word order to do (like determining the subject or object of a verb).
posted by trig at 10:05 AM on October 30 [2 favorites]
There's an overlap between poetry and zoomorphic calligraphy (primarily in Arabic and related languages) that seems potentially of interest here. A Google image search turned up these results in English and Spanish that I can actually read; the artist chose different shapes. In both cases the format makes the word order a bit ambiguous.
posted by aincandenza at 11:14 AM on October 30 [1 favorite]
posted by aincandenza at 11:14 AM on October 30 [1 favorite]
Yeah the premise here is wrong. English word order is fairly fixed, mostly because English doesn't have the kinds of inflections to indicate relationships that other languages do. It's easier to play around with word order in German than English for this reason.
Am not qualified to say whether poetry and prose style is otherwise coupled to language features.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:56 AM on October 30 [2 favorites]
Am not qualified to say whether poetry and prose style is otherwise coupled to language features.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:56 AM on October 30 [2 favorites]
An interesting book on these ideas is Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadter. Each chapter presents a different translation of the French poem "A une Damoyselle malade" by Clément Marot into English, and highlights different aspects of things like poetry, language, and translation. Excellent and thought-provoking.
posted by indexy at 12:08 PM on October 30 [2 favorites]
posted by indexy at 12:08 PM on October 30 [2 favorites]
Some random notes on poetry in different languages I know something about...
Haiku and other Japanese forms are based on morae, not syllables. Long syllables, and final -n, add a mora. So henkō 'change' is four morae: he-n-ko-o.
Old Chinese poems were typically written in four-character lines; fortunately the language encouraged extraordinary concision. Though in Hàn times there developed a taste for florid description and arcane vocabulary, such that even scholars complained that the poems were hard to read.
In Hàn times five-character poetry appeared. An example from Táng times showing the almost cinematic quality that could be achieved, without observers and tense:
Translators of Dante usually complain that terza rima (ABA BCB CDC...) is far easier in Italian, which has more rhymes available.
Classic plays in English are written in blank verse, which is based on both syllable count and stress; the equivalents in French were in alexandrines, where each line is 12 syllables and stress is ignored.
Sanskrit has even stricter meters than English, e.g. the 17-syllable prithvī, with the pattern LHLLLHLHLLLHLHHLL (L = light, H = heavy syllables). Sanskrit also makes heavy use of compound phrases; one long poem, sadly lost, uses purposeful ambiguity to simultaneously retell the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata.
Latin verse (prose is a different matter!) is subject to what grammarians call scrambling. E.g. this verse from Horace:
posted by zompist at 2:11 PM on October 30 [5 favorites]
Haiku and other Japanese forms are based on morae, not syllables. Long syllables, and final -n, add a mora. So henkō 'change' is four morae: he-n-ko-o.
Old Chinese poems were typically written in four-character lines; fortunately the language encouraged extraordinary concision. Though in Hàn times there developed a taste for florid description and arcane vocabulary, such that even scholars complained that the poems were hard to read.
In Hàn times five-character poetry appeared. An example from Táng times showing the almost cinematic quality that could be achieved, without observers and tense:
孤舟蓑苙翁 独钓寒江雪(Those are modern Mandarin readings of the characters... which in fact modern Mandarin speakers would use.)
Gū zhōu suō lì wēng / Dú diào hán jiāng xuě.
A single boat. Bamboo-leaf clothes. Old man. / Fishing alone. Cold, river, snow.
Translators of Dante usually complain that terza rima (ABA BCB CDC...) is far easier in Italian, which has more rhymes available.
Classic plays in English are written in blank verse, which is based on both syllable count and stress; the equivalents in French were in alexandrines, where each line is 12 syllables and stress is ignored.
Sanskrit has even stricter meters than English, e.g. the 17-syllable prithvī, with the pattern LHLLLHLHLLLHLHHLL (L = light, H = heavy syllables). Sanskrit also makes heavy use of compound phrases; one long poem, sadly lost, uses purposeful ambiguity to simultaneously retell the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata.
Latin verse (prose is a different matter!) is subject to what grammarians call scrambling. E.g. this verse from Horace:
Quis multā gracilis tē puer in rosāYou almost need a diagram to see it, but this is what the prosaic word order would be:
perfūsus liquidīs urget odōribus
grātō, Pyrrha, sub antrō?
What slender boy, wet with perfumes,
is making love to you, Pyrrha,
amid many roses, in a delightful cave?
Quis gracilis puer, perfūsus liquidīs odōribus, tē urget, Pyrrha, in multā rosā sub grātō antrō?As to how hard this would be— well, you'd have to ask the poets. Things that seem hard to a language learner, like the Latin case/gender/number agreements that allow Horace's scrambling, are second nature to a native speaker. But some forms were purposely difficult or show-offy.
posted by zompist at 2:11 PM on October 30 [5 favorites]
Polish is a declension based language like Latin, so you can play with word order as you please. With very few exceptions you stress the second to last syllable of a word, so things like iambic pentameter are very difficult in natural language - there are some, but it's very much a technical exercise. The most popular meter is the thirteen syllable Polish alexandrine, with a mid-line stressed central syllable. It's used for translations of pentameter and hexameter too because Polish words tend to have a lot more syllables due to declensions.
On the other hand due to grammar it's trivially easy to get rhymes to the point where rhyming based on last syllable alone is considered childish. Rhyming can involve as many as three syllables.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 4:01 PM on October 30 [2 favorites]
On the other hand due to grammar it's trivially easy to get rhymes to the point where rhyming based on last syllable alone is considered childish. Rhyming can involve as many as three syllables.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 4:01 PM on October 30 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Just popping in to say you guys are, as per usual, amazing.
posted by es_de_bah at 4:52 AM on October 31
posted by es_de_bah at 4:52 AM on October 31
Does the grammer fluidity of a language have an obvious affect on poetry and culture?
Hi, I am a linguist.
I've also studied several languages with vastly different grammar, although I will be upfront that I've never been that big a fan of poetry. It's not that I dislike it, I often do, it's just that I haven't cultivated a very deep knowledge of, like, Latin poetry and its forms. However, my specialty in linguistics was specifically prosody: the rhythm and intonation of speech. I feel like this might be relevant.
One thing to consider is that poetry is an art, and that one of the things people appreciate about it is the skill of the poet. Thus, like I claim sanctuary's example, if the existence of declensions means that it's trivial to make final syllables of a line rhyme, this is probably not going to be considered sufficient for a good rhyme.
The grammar of a language does influence how poetry "works," because a culture will develop poetic forms that suit the language; it won't develop poetic forms that are impossible or so trivial that they involve little to no craft. This sometimes gets turned into culturally myopic people claiming that this-or-that language (usually their own or one that has a lot of cultural prestige) is better for poetry, because they're judging according to the poetic forms they're familiar with.
It's not just the language that influences poetic forms, of course. Japanese haiku are much more than just the mora scheme; imagery is also extremely important, using literary/poetic tropes and references with cultural significance. The concision of classical Han poetry was not imposed by the features of the language itself, but by the fact that a concise style was highly valued culturally.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:04 AM on October 31 [3 favorites]
Hi, I am a linguist.
I've also studied several languages with vastly different grammar, although I will be upfront that I've never been that big a fan of poetry. It's not that I dislike it, I often do, it's just that I haven't cultivated a very deep knowledge of, like, Latin poetry and its forms. However, my specialty in linguistics was specifically prosody: the rhythm and intonation of speech. I feel like this might be relevant.
One thing to consider is that poetry is an art, and that one of the things people appreciate about it is the skill of the poet. Thus, like I claim sanctuary's example, if the existence of declensions means that it's trivial to make final syllables of a line rhyme, this is probably not going to be considered sufficient for a good rhyme.
The grammar of a language does influence how poetry "works," because a culture will develop poetic forms that suit the language; it won't develop poetic forms that are impossible or so trivial that they involve little to no craft. This sometimes gets turned into culturally myopic people claiming that this-or-that language (usually their own or one that has a lot of cultural prestige) is better for poetry, because they're judging according to the poetic forms they're familiar with.
It's not just the language that influences poetic forms, of course. Japanese haiku are much more than just the mora scheme; imagery is also extremely important, using literary/poetic tropes and references with cultural significance. The concision of classical Han poetry was not imposed by the features of the language itself, but by the fact that a concise style was highly valued culturally.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:04 AM on October 31 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: that mine is a question wrongly put doesn't diminish the gratefulness I have for answering folks.
posted by es_de_bah at 5:27 PM on October 31
posted by es_de_bah at 5:27 PM on October 31
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
posted by dis_integration at 8:50 AM on October 30 [4 favorites]