On alliteration and assonance

When most people think about verse, they tend to think of rhyme first and foremost. Understandable, since that’s the defining quality of so much poetry. But there’s a whole other side of the word to explore, a front-end counterpart to the back-end rhyme.

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of a sound at the beginning of a word, a mirror image to rhyming. It’s not quite as obvious these days, as rhyme and rhythm have won our hearts and minds, but it has an illustrious history. Some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon verse was composed using alliteration, as were epics from around the Western world. Classics such as “The Raven” and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” have sections of alliterative verse, as do children’s nursery rhymes. Peter Piper probably needed something to catch the spit from all those P sounds. And who can forget all those old cartoons with hilariously alliterative newspaper headlines? Those were a thing, and they still are in places.

Echoes of alliteration are all around us. Like rhyme, the reason borders on the psychological. In oration, the beginning of the word tends to be more forceful than the end, more evocative. So punctuating your point with purpose (see what I did there?) helps to get your message stuck in the minds of your listeners. They can “latch on” to the repetition. Wikipedia’s article on alliteration uses King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as an example: “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Notice how the hard K sounds beginning each of the “core” words grab your attention.

To be alliterative, you don’t have to use the same sound at the beginning of every word. The rules of English simply can’t accommodate that. (Newspapers cheated by removing extraneous words such as “a” and “the”.) It’s the content words that are most important, especially the adjectives and nouns. However, alliteration tends to be stricter than rhyme in what’s considered the “same” sound. Voicing differences change the quality of the sound, so they’re out. Clusters are in the same boat. On the other hand, sometimes an unstressed syllable (like un- or a-) can be ignored for the purposes of alliteration.

Assonance

Alliteration is concerned with consonant sounds. (I did it again!) Assonance is different; it’s all about the vowels. What’s more, it’s not limited to the beginnings of words. Rather, it’s a vowel sound repeated throughout a phrase or line of verse. Vowel rhyming can be considered a form of assonance, but it’s so much more than that.

Assonance pops up everywhere there are vowels, which means everywhere. It’s very well suited to small utterances, such as a single line of a song or a proverb. As with alliteration, it’s not an absolute requirement for all the vowels to be the same, but those that are need to be essentially identical. And it’s the content words that are most important. Schwas, ineffectual as they are, don’t even appear on the radar; a and the aren’t going to mess up assonance. But any other vowel is fair game, in English or whatever language you’re using.

In conlangs

Alliteration and assonance are perfectly usable in any context, and they can be made to fit any language. They might not be quite as permissive as rhyme, but they can have a greater lyrical effect when used properly. (And sparingly. Don’t overdo it.)

These literary devices work best in languages with patterns of stress. That stress can be fixed, but that narrows your options slightly. Inflectional languages with fixed final stress are probably the worst for alliteration, while initial stress gives the most “punch”. For assonance, it’s not so vital, but you want to make sure your vowels aren’t being forced to a fit a pattern.

Both alliteration and assonance are easiest to accomplish in languages with smaller phonemic inventories. That shouldn’t be surprising. It’s far less work to find two words that both begin with a P if your only other options are B, D, K, and S. With these smaller sound sets (are you kidding me?), you can even create more complex styles of alliterative verse. Imagine a CV-type language with interwoven alliteration patterns, where the first and third words of a line start with one sound, while the second and fourth begin with a different one.

The other end of the spectrum holds English and most European languages, and it’s less amenable. You need lots of words, or you’ll have to get some help from stress and syllabics. That’s how we can have alliterative English: by ignoring those tiny, unstressed prefixes that pop up everywhere. It’s possible to make it work, but you have to try harder. But trying is what this is all about.

On game jams

This post is going up in August, and that’s the month for the summer version of everyone’s favorite game jam, Ludum Dare. But I’m writing this at the end of June, when there’s still a bit of drama regarding whether the competition will even take place. If it does, then that’s great. If not, well, that’s too bad. Neither outcome affects the substance of this text.

Ludum Dare isn’t the only game jam on the market, anyway. It’s just the most popular. But all of them have a few things in common. They’re competitive programming, in the sense of writing a program that follows certain rules (such as a theme) in a certain time—two or three days, for example, or a week—with the results being judged and winners declared. In this, it’s a little more serious than something like NaNoWriMo.

And it’s not for me. Now, that’s just my opinion. I’m not saying game jams are a bad thing in general, nor am I casting aspersions at LD in particular. I simply don’t feel that something like this fits my coding style. It’s the same thing with NaNoWriMo, actually. I’ve never truly “competed” in it, though I have followed along with the “write 50,000 words in November” guideline. Again, that’s because it’s not my style.

One reason is shyness. I don’t want people to see my unfinished work. I’m afraid of what they’d say. Another reason is the schedule, and that’s far more of a factor for a three-day game jam than a month-long writing exercise. I don’t think I could stand to code for the better part of 48 or 72 hours. Call it flightiness or a poor attention span, but I can’t code (or write) for hours on end. I have to take a break and do something else for a while.

Finally, there are the rules themselves. I don’t like rules intruding on my creative expression. In my view, trying to direct art of any kind is a waste of time. I have my own ideas and themes, thank you very much. All I need from you is the gentle nudge to get me to put them into action. That’s why I do a kind of “shadow” NaNoWriMo, instead of participating in the “real thing”. It seems antisocial, but I feel it’s a better use of my time and effort. What’s important is the goal you set for yourself. Climbing into a straitjacket to achieve it just doesn’t appeal to me.

But I do see why others look at game jams differently. They are that nudge, that impetus that helps us overcome our writing (or coding) inertia. And that is a noble enough purpose. I doubt I’ll join the next Ludum Dare or whatever, but I won’t begrudge the existence of the game jam. It does what it needs to do: it gets people to express themselves. It gets them to write code when they otherwise wouldn’t dare. There’s nothing bad about that, even if it isn’t my thing.

Summer Reading List 2016: halfway home

We’re halfway through the official summer, about two-thirds of the way done with the unofficial season we’re using for our Summer Reading List. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got two out of three.

Fiction

  • Title: Shadows of Self
  • Author: Brandon Sanderson
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Year: 2015

This is the fifth book in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series, the second of the second trilogy. It’s a pretty good one, though I feel it’s a bit weaker than some of the previous four. Compared to its predecessor, The Alloy of Law, it’s a bit lighter on the action, but far heavier on the worldbuilding. That’s fine by me. If you haven’t noticed, I love worldbuilding, and Sanderson is one of the best there is when it comes to it. I’ll definitely give this one high marks, and I can’t wait to read the trilogy’s finale, The Bands of Mourning. (It’s already out, by the way.)

Nonfiction

  • Title: A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life
  • Author: Greg Jenner
  • Genre: History
  • Year: 2016

I found this one not too long ago (somewhere…), and I’m glad I did. It’s a fun look back through the history of everyday things and activities, following and relating to one modern man’s Saturday. I love history, and I especially love those smaller, less popular bits of it. History is not all about wars and religion and politics and race. It’s about people living their lives, and those lives never really change that much. And that’s the message of this book. Definitely worth a look, especially from a worldbuilding perspective. (Funny how that works out, huh?)

And one more…

I haven’t decided what the final book on the list will be, but I’ve got another month, so I should be okay. I hope you’re playing along at home, and that you’re having fun doing it.