Portal:Poetry/Language Corner

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Portal:Poetry/Language Corner/1

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. All languages use intonation to express emphasis, contrast, emotion, or other such nuances, but not every language uses tone to distinguish lexical meaning. When this occurs, tones are phonemes (discrete speech sounds), just like consonants and vowels, and they are occasionally referred to as tonemes.

A slight majority of the languages in the world are tonal. However, most Indo-European languages, which include the majority of the most widely spoken languages in the world today, are not tonal. The way in which tone is used in a particular language leads to the language being classified either as a tonal language or a pitch accented language.

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Portal:Poetry/Language Corner/2

The book Notes on Prosody by bi-lingual author Vladimir Nabokov compares differences in iambic verse in the English and Russian languages, and highlights the effect of relative word length in the two languages on rhythm. Nabokov also proposes an approach for scanning patterns of accent which interact with syllabic stress in iambic verse. Originally Appendix 2 to his Commentary accompanying his translation of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Notes on Prosody was released separately in book form. Both the translation of Eugene Onegin and Notes on Prosody sparked considerable academic debate. Nabokov is known both for his Russian language poetry and his English language prose.

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The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit, or Vedic accent for brevity, is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta "raised" (acute accent), anudātta "not raised" (grave accent) and svarita "sounded" (circumflex). In the Rigveda, svarita is marked with a small upright stroke above a syllable and anudātta with a horizontal line below the syllable, while udātta remains unmarked.

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Portal:Poetry/Language Corner/4

A syllable (Ancient Greek: συλλαβή) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. It is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).

Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter, its stress patterns, etc.

A word that consists of a single syllable (like English cat) is called a monosyllable (such a word is monosyllabic), while a word consisting of two syllables (like monkey) is called a disyllable (such a word is disyllabic). A word consisting of three syllables (such as indigent) is called a trisyllable (the adjective form is trisyllabic). A word consisting of more than three syllables (such as intelligence) is called a polysyllable (and could be described as polysyllabic), although this term is often used to describe words of two syllables or more.

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In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. A vowel is also understood to be syllabic: an equivalent open but non-syllabic sound is called a semivowel.

In all languages, vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and (in languages which have them) coda. However, some languages also allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the syllabic l in the English word table [ˈteɪ.bl̩] (the stroke under the l indicates that it is syllabic; the dot separates syllables), or the r in the Czech word vrba [vr̩.ba] "willow".

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Portal:Poetry/Language Corner/6

The word thou (pronounced IPA [ðaʊ]) is mostly archaic, functioning as the second person singular pronoun in English and having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee (functioning as both accusative and dative), and the possessive is thy or thine. Almost all verbs following "thou" have the endings -st or -est; e.g., "thou goest". In Middle English, thou was sometimes abbreviated by writing a Wynn-shaped letter Thorn with a small u above it.

Originally, "thou" was simply the singular counterpart to the plural pronoun "ye," descended from an ancient Indo-European root. In imitation of the French practice, "thou" was later used to express intimacy, familiarity, or even disrespect while another pronoun, "you" was used for formal circumstances. See French "vous" and Dutch "U". After "thou" fell out of fashion, it was primarily retained in fixed rituals, so that it eventually came to connote formality and solemnity. "Thou" persists, sometimes in altered form, in regional dialects of England and Scotland.

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Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris, "common speech") is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire until those dialects, diverging still further, evolved into the early Romance languages — a distinction usually made around the ninth century.

This spoken Latin differed from the literary language of classical Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some features of Vulgar Latin did not appear until the late Empire. Other features are likely to have been in place in spoken Latin, in at least its basilectal forms, much earlier. Most definitions of "vulgar Latin" mean that it is a spoken language, rather than a written language, because the evidence suggests that spoken Latin broke up into divergent dialects during this period. Because no one transcribed phonetically the daily speech of any Latin speakers during the period in question, students of Vulgar Latin must study it through indirect methods.

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