阿鼠的博客

摘自: http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/resources/resources/exp_lang/putting_words.html

Rhythm

English is a very rhythmical language. Rhythm is not only found in poetry.

Thee rhythm can be heard when we count aloud:
     five / ten / fifteen / twenty.

The stressed syllables are lengthened in five and ten, and shortened in fifteen and twenty, so that the words with two syllables are about the same length as those with only one.

The rhythm of English speech is produced through the combination of the stressed and unstressed syllables. This is like a beat and is especially easy to distinguish in rap.

Nursery rhymes sound especially rhythmical.
This is the / house that / Jack / built.
Humpty / Dumpty / sat on a / wall.

The rhythm produced by this combination of stressed and unstressed syllables is very characteristic of spoken English. It makes English a stress-timed language. Examples of other stress-timed languages are Russian and Portuguese.

In some languages, by contrast, the syllables are produced in a steady flow, which is unaffected by the stress differences. These are known as syllable-timed languages.

French, Mâori, and Samoan are some examples of syllable-timed languages.

Mâori-accented English, which is frequently heard in parts of New Zealand, has a distinctive rhythm which is syllable timed rather than stress timed. The grammatical words are heard more distinctly than in Pâkehâ New Zealand English, where they are very weak and indistinct.

Syllable timing is a feature of other varieties of ethnically marked English, such as West Indian English, and Aboriginal English in Australia.

Rhythm and Poetry

Students of English literature traditionally studied the rhythm of poetry, analysing the poetic lines according to their combinations of stressed (/ ) and unstressed () syllables, which were called feet. These sound patterns are known as metre (from Latin metrum, meaning a measure), and the study of them, along with the study of rhyme and stanza forms, is called prosody.

The best known patterns of rhythm in English poetry are as follows:

• Iamb ( / )
  Example: Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. (Tennyson)

  This is the most common metre and is often heard in natural speech.

• Trochee ( / )
  Example: Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple. (Longfellow)

• Anapaest ( / )
  Example: Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace. (Browning)

• Dactyl ( / )
  Example: Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me. (Hardy)

This kind of analysis works quite well with traditional verse in regular rhythm, but where the rhythm is irregular, these patterns are hard to apply. They are of little use in describing a lot of modern poetry, especially free verse. We have included this information here both because it is useful when studying poetry written in traditional styles and because it demonstrates one of the few ways in which spoken language was explored in school in the past.