Value of overlong syllable in Persian meters, a descriptive and analytic survey

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Associate professor of Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

10.30465/copl.2021.6155

Abstract

In Persian language, there are poems which are merely made of long syllable. These poems are of two types: 1- A verse or line which its scansion meter turned to be a string of long syllables because of its Taskin license; whereas its standard meter should be found out through studying other sections of the poem. These scansion meters are free variant of the other meters. Syllabification in these poems is done based on standard meter. If two different verses of this type, each of them being free variant of another meter, have an equal length, so phonetic characteristic, which distinguishes the meter of these two verses, is foot stress. This stress is placed in the latest, long, non-final syllable of foot; and its nature is non-linguistic. 2- Poems which are originally made of only long syllable. The meter of such poems cannot be considered as free variant of another meter; their being rhythmic is resulted from their syllabification based on the length and boundary of words in such a way that the boundary of foot is usually coincident with the boundary of the word; and by an alteration in the length and syllabification of the words, their meter will also change. Phonetic characteristic, which makes it possible for foots to be identified, is the stress on the first syllable of each foot. Stress unifies some syllables together and differentiates them from other syllables as well as converting them to one foot; and meter is determined according to the number of syllables of foot.

Keywords


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