forehead: the little girl with a little curl right in the middle of hers

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/5/2008 09:27 AM, Charles Doyle wrote:
>That's an important point commonly overlooked by literary scholars.
>The only really "perfect" rhyme would be a repitition of the same
>word (in the same syntactic position, etc.)--which is usually not
>thought of as a rhyme at all. Otherwise, we're loosely weighing the
>relative "closeness" among a range of phonological features.
>
>Also, since no rhyme is perfect, one must be cautious about using
>rhymes to establish historical pronunciations.

The same point has been made on the "Long Eighteenth Century} email
list (C18-L), by (I think) Kevin Burland, during a discussion of
recovery of 18th century pronunciations.

Joel

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