[New-Poetry] Questions on form

[Jason Quackenbush]

Chris Lott wrote:
> On Jan 1, 2008 7:28 PM, Jason Quackenbush <jfq at myuw.net> wrote:
>   
>> I count "William," "different" as a three syllable words and "beautiful"
>> and "Everyone" as four syllable words. so there are four lines in this
>> that have eight syllables. which is what i mean by "shoehorning" which
>> is what you have to do if you want to say that every line here is in
>> regular 7 syllable units. and you have to do that if you want to use
>> traditional bivalent scansion toaccount for what feels like the
>> regularity in this.
>>     
>
> That's 4 for 4 in syllable counts being different from mine.. William
> and different are 2 syllable words in my mouth, beautiful and everyone
> are 3... I'll have to start listening more closely, but I can't think
> of anyone I know who adds the extra syllable in there when speaking.
> Or I just don't hear them :)
>
> c
>   
I'm not surprised there's disagreement. Most people treat dipthongs as 
single syllables when they're scanning poetry, but most people when 
speaking give dipthongs more time than a long vowel, so i think it makes 
sense to count them as two syllables, particularly since there are two 
sounds there. which is why william is three and beautiful is four. Also, 
most people miss that there's an unstressed syllable in the middle of 
"different" because it's extremely unstressed. However, I think there's 
a noticable difference between the word "different" and "diffrent" where 
the latter has an "fr" consonant cluster due to the missing unstressed 
schwa in the middle of "different," and likewise the whole stress 
pattern of the word shifts a touch. the same thing goes for "Everyone", 
contrast with "Evryone" and you'll see where the fourth syllable is.

Then again, we may have significantly different dialects which might be 
the cause of the difference here too. What part of the world did you 
grow up in?