Talk:Foot (prosody)

Why quantitative measures?

ioio'm a little unclear as to why this article focuses on quantitative meter, especially as it's written in English - there are few successful examples of quantitative meter in English poetry. This article should focus on stresses and not on syllable length.

The article seems quite clear about the distinction:

A foot is described by the character and number of syllables it contains: in English, feet are named for the combination of accented and unaccented syllables; in other languages such as Latin and Greek, the duration of the syllable (long or short) is measured.

Then, before the list of feet:

The following lists describe the feet in terms of vowel length (as in classical languages). Translated into syllable stresses (as in English poetry), long becomes accented and short becomes unaccented. For example, an iamb, which is short-long in classical meter, becomes unstressed-stressed, as in the English word "betray."

So the article seems to clearly say that in English we use stress/unstress as patterns. Whether the lists are in long-short or stressed-unstressed is basically arbitrary. I think long/short takes precedence here because meter is more often studied in depth in study of classical languages. Tom

I understand that. But the fact that it chooses to describe the feet foremostly in quantitative terms with only a note regarding these terms in accentual-syllabic verse suggests that the quantitative description is the more important of the two. It certainly is, if you are writing in a Romance language or studying classical poetry; it is of secondary importance if you are writing in English or studying English poetry. I think an accurate list of accentual-syllabic feet should be included, though I see the importance of describing quantitative feet as well. Perhaps there should be an additional section on accentual-syllabic (or English) feet; this section would only need to describe the iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, pyrrhus and spondee, as the remaining classical feet don't really translate well into English. Prestonmarkstone 14:46, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

This Language Rules

I just want to express my appreciation of this line:

In verse, many meters use a foot ...

rowley (talk) 17:34, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

External link

Broken. Maria Sieglinda von Nudeldorf (talk) 11:51, 13 September 2009 (UTC)