This means I'm on the right track as to what's going on: it's not only consonants, but stress/accent alignment.
To elaborate a little on how I'm making these lines easier for cahn, in case we end up doing a song video again ('cause this was so much fun! although time-consuming enough we should only do it very rarely):
English prefers to alternate stressed-unstressed syllables. This is why so much of our poetry is iambic pentameter (or iambic something). English *really* doesn't like adjacent stressed syllables, there's even a name for the phenomenon in one major linguistic theory I learned.
Within a word, you know how to stress syllables: "Selena" is stressed xXx, "Mildred" Xx, Cahn is X.
But there's also phrase- and sentence-level stress. Very roughtly, nouns will carry the most stress, then adjectives and some adverbs, then verbs, then function words (prepositions, articles, forms of 'to be').
Generally speaking, you want your phrase/sentence-level stress to line up with the metrical beats, so that the most stressed syllables in the sentence are the accented syllables in the meter. Now, if the meter always perfectly alternates stressed and unstressed syllables, and the meter always lines up perfectly with the sentence stress, you can get an artificial, monotonous, over-emphasized effect. So a little variation is good. But that's the basic theme you riff on.
So the reason "the Spanish king's a frog" is easier than "Spain's king is a frog", is that the sentence-level stress of "Spanish king's" goes XxX, whereas "Spain's king is" goes "XXx". So in the second one, the most stressed syllable, i.e., "king", falls in a position where the meter wants an unaccented syllable, and the least stressed syllable, "is", falls in a position where the meter wants an accented syllable. Because the meter wants XxX.
That's also why sticking "the" in helps, because if you assume a basic pattern of expecting alternating stressed and unstressed syllables for the line, you get
France now has a Regency
X x X x X x X
and then the next syllable wants to be unstressed. Hence the "the":
France now has a Regency, the Spanish king's a frog
X x X x X x X x X x X x X
You can now easily see one reason why
Franklin prints, lots of quips
X x X X x X
is harder to sing than
Franklin prints and writes and quips
X x X x X x X
even though "lots" and "writes" are almost identical in terms of consonants!
That's also one reason I find "aging Sun King" (xXxX) easier than "Sun King old" (XXX), though Cahn has yet to weigh in on that one. (The repetition of "ing" also helps.)
You can also see why I said
Triple monarch turnover
X x X x X X x
was slightly easier than
F Wilhelm dead, dead emperor
X X x X X X x X
, but complained about "turnover" not being ideal, and why Cahn's reaction was "I think it's a little better" rather than "Yes! That's much better!" (Of course, "triple monarch turnover" is also not the easiest phrase either phonetically or in terms of cognitive load.)
When I wrote my song lyrics, when I was struggling with a line, I literally wrote out the stress pattern of the corresponding medieval line (which is very earwormy) using X x X x X x symbols, and the stress pattern of my line directly below it, and rewrote and rewrote mine until the Xs were the same.
TLDR: I'm sticking in unstressed syllables as needed to break up adjacent stressed syllables, and lining up nouns with the stresses as much as possible.
Btw, it occurred to me yesterday that in addition to my formal linguistic background coming in handy, a surprising amount of my PhD involved poetics! I can't write poetry to save my life, and I certainly didn't specialize in poetics, but comparative Indo-European poetics came up a lot in class (two of my professors specialized in it, plus my advisor specialized in Old English metrics) and in my reading, and I definitely drew on that when composing my lyrics. (All this is also why my lyrics took like 8 hours and 2 drafts, both the writing out of stress patterns and the "What would an Indo-European bard do here?")
And then I went and decided "Struensee, Stanislaus Leszczynski" was a perfectly cromulent line to force on cahn. :P
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timeasmymeasure
Re: We didn't start the fire: Anglo-picking
Date: 2025-03-06 08:49 am (UTC)To elaborate a little on how I'm making these lines easier for
English prefers to alternate stressed-unstressed syllables. This is why so much of our poetry is iambic pentameter (or iambic something). English *really* doesn't like adjacent stressed syllables, there's even a name for the phenomenon in one major linguistic theory I learned.
Within a word, you know how to stress syllables: "Selena" is stressed xXx, "Mildred" Xx, Cahn is X.
But there's also phrase- and sentence-level stress. Very roughtly, nouns will carry the most stress, then adjectives and some adverbs, then verbs, then function words (prepositions, articles, forms of 'to be').
Generally speaking, you want your phrase/sentence-level stress to line up with the metrical beats, so that the most stressed syllables in the sentence are the accented syllables in the meter. Now, if the meter always perfectly alternates stressed and unstressed syllables, and the meter always lines up perfectly with the sentence stress, you can get an artificial, monotonous, over-emphasized effect. So a little variation is good. But that's the basic theme you riff on.
So the reason "the Spanish king's a frog" is easier than "Spain's king is a frog", is that the sentence-level stress of "Spanish king's" goes XxX, whereas "Spain's king is" goes "XXx". So in the second one, the most stressed syllable, i.e., "king", falls in a position where the meter wants an unaccented syllable, and the least stressed syllable, "is", falls in a position where the meter wants an accented syllable. Because the meter wants XxX.
That's also why sticking "the" in helps, because if you assume a basic pattern of expecting alternating stressed and unstressed syllables for the line, you get
and then the next syllable wants to be unstressed. Hence the "the":
You can now easily see one reason why
is harder to sing than
even though "lots" and "writes" are almost identical in terms of consonants!
That's also one reason I find "aging Sun King" (xXxX) easier than "Sun King old" (XXX), though Cahn has yet to weigh in on that one. (The repetition of "ing" also helps.)
You can also see why I said
was slightly easier than
, but complained about "turnover" not being ideal, and why Cahn's reaction was "I think it's a little better" rather than "Yes! That's much better!" (Of course, "triple monarch turnover" is also not the easiest phrase either phonetically or in terms of cognitive load.)
When I wrote my song lyrics, when I was struggling with a line, I literally wrote out the stress pattern of the corresponding medieval line (which is very earwormy) using X x X x X x symbols, and the stress pattern of my line directly below it, and rewrote and rewrote mine until the Xs were the same.
TLDR: I'm sticking in unstressed syllables as needed to break up adjacent stressed syllables, and lining up nouns with the stresses as much as possible.
Btw, it occurred to me yesterday that in addition to my formal linguistic background coming in handy, a surprising amount of my PhD involved poetics! I can't write poetry to save my life, and I certainly didn't specialize in poetics, but comparative Indo-European poetics came up a lot in class (two of my professors specialized in it, plus my advisor specialized in Old English metrics) and in my reading, and I definitely drew on that when composing my lyrics. (All this is also why my lyrics took like 8 hours and 2 drafts, both the writing out of stress patterns and the "What would an Indo-European bard do here?")
And then I went and decided "Struensee, Stanislaus Leszczynski" was a perfectly cromulent line to force on