I’ve been doing posts on here for a year now, and there’s been one glaring omission. The name of the place is “Prose Poetry Code”, but we have yet to see any actual posts about poetry. So let’s fix that by looking at how we can add a poetic touch to a constructed language by using that most famous of poetic devices: rhyme.
You most likely already know what rhyme is, so we can skip the generalities. It’s all around us, in our songs, in our video game mysteries, in our nursery rhymes and limericks and everywhere else you look. Do we need a definition?
The sound of a rhyme
From a linguistic perspective, we probably do. Yes, it’s easy to point at two words (“sing” and “thing”, for instance) and say that they rhyme. But where’s the boundary? Rhyme is a similarity in the final sounds of words or syllables, but we have to define how close these sounds must be before they’re considered to rhyme. Do “sing” and “seen” rhyme? The English phonemes /n/ and /ŋ/ aren’t too far apart, as any dialectal speech illustrates.
So there’s your first “dimension” to rhyme. Clearly, there are limits, but they can be fluid. (Poetry is all about breaking the rules, isn’t it?) Most languages would allow inexact rhymes, as long as there’s enough of a connection between the sounds, but how much is necessary will depend on the language and its culture. You can go where you want on this, but a good starting point is the following set of guidelines:
- A sound always rhymes with itself. (This one’s obvious, but there’s always allophonic variation to worry about.)
- Two consonants rhyme if they differ only in voice. (You can add aspiration or palatalization here, if that’s appropriate for your conlang.)
- Two vowels rhyme if they differ only in length. (Again, if this is a valid distinction.)
- A diphthong can rhyme with its primary vocalic component. (In other words, /ei/ can rhyme with /e/ but not /i/.)
- Nasal consonants rhyme with any other nasal. (This is a generalization of the explanation above.)
This isn’t perfect, and it’s especially not intended to be a list of commandments from on high. Feel free to tweak a bit to give your conlang its own flavor. And if you’re using an odder phonology, look for the contrasts that make it distinct.
Where to begin, where to end
Another thing to think about is how much of a syllable is considered for a rhyme. In Chinese, for instance, it’s basically everything but an initial consonant. English, with its complicated phonological and syllabic systems, allows more freedom. Clusters can count as simplified consonants or stand on their own. Reduced or unstressed vowels can be omitted, as can consonants: “’twas”, “o’er”.
Once again, this is creativity at work, so I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your decision. Really, the only “hard” rule here is that the initial part of a syllable rarely, if ever, has to match for a rhyme. Everything else is up for grabs.
With longer words, it’s the same way, but this is a case where different languages can do things differently. Stress patterns can play a role, and so can the grammar itself. To take one example, Esperanto’s system for marking word class by means of a change in final vowels is interesting from a mechanical point of view, but it’s awful for rhyming poetry. One could argue that all nouns rhyme, which is…suboptimal. (A better option there might be to require rhyming of the penultimate syllable, since Esperanto always stresses it, ignoring the “marker” vowel altogether.)
Going in a different direction, it’s easy to see that a language with CV syllables—think something in the Polynesian family here—will tend to have very long words. With a small set of phonemes, there aren’t too many combinations, and that could lead to too much rhyming. Maybe a language like that requires multiple matching syllables, but it might just discard rhyme as a poetic device instead.
And then there’s tone. I don’t speak a tonal language, so I’ve got little to go on here, but I can see a couple of ways this plays out. Either tone is ignored for rhyming, in which case you have nothing to worry about, or it’s important. If that’s true, then you have to work out which tones are allowed to rhyme. For “level” tones (high, low, medium), you could say that they have to be within one “step”. “Contour” tones may have to end at roughly the same pitch. Why the end, you may ask? Because rhyming is inherently tied to the ends of syllables.
Different strokes
As rhyme is tied to the spoken form of a language, it will be affected by the different ways that language is spoken—in other words, dialects.
One good example of this in English is “marry”. Does it rhyme with “tarry”? Most people would say so. What about “gory”? Probably not. “Berry”? Ah, there you might have a problem. Some dialects merge the vowels in “marry” and “merry”, while most other (American) ones don’t.
Rhyming verse is made to be spoken, recited, chanted, or sung, not merely read, so this is not a theoretical problem. It’s important for anyone writing in a natural language with any significant dialectal variation. Nor is it limited to slight changes in vowel quality. What about English /r/? It disappears at the end of words in England, but not America…at least in speech. Except for country music, most singers tend to drop the R because it sounds better, which has the side effect of creating more opportunities to rhyme.
Of course, for a conlang, you probably don’t have to think about dialects unless you’re specifically creating them. Still, it might be useful to think about for more “hardcore” worldbuilding.
Sing a song
Rhyming isn’t everything in poetry. It’s not even the most important part, and many types of verse get by just fine without it. But I started with it for two reasons: it’s the easiest to explain, and it’s the simplest to build into your conlangs. In fact, you’ve probably already got it, if you look close enough. (If you’re using random generation to create your words, however, you may not have enough similar words to get good rhymes. That’s where author fiat has to come in. Get in there and make them.)
If you don’t care for rhymes, that’s not a problem. Others do, and if you’re making a language for other people to speak, such as an auxlang, you have to be prepared for it. Poetry is all about wordplay, and creativity is an unstoppable force. Whether song or spoken word, people will find ways to make things work.