"cross-language homophonic poetry" -- or something

David Bergdahl dlbrgdhl at GMAIL.COM
Thu Jan 19 15:42:04 UTC 2006


In graduate school aeons ago macaronic verse was defined as one with two
languages such as in Th. Skelton's 16thC verse which incorporates Latin
lines in the English.  But the authoritative Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics (1965--enlarged ed 1974) says "Macaronic verse
incorporates words of the writer's native tongue in another language and
subjects them to its grammatical laws, thus achieving a comic effect."  The
citation goes on to say that "loosely speaking, the term [...] has been
applied to any verse mingling two or more languages together."

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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