lack of rhymes

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Jan Ullrich wrote:
> While working on Lakota language teaching materials for young learners I
> have been in search for rhymes such as parents tell or read to their
> children in Indo-European and other languages.

My understanding is that rhyming verse was a fashion introduced in Europe
from Arabic, via Spain.  Verse in the classical languages of Europe has
meter, but is otherwise either "blank" (without rhyme) or aliterative, as
in early Germanic verse.  Early Indo-European verse traditions also
emphasize special stock phrasings, Homer's "wine-dark sea" and
"rosy-fingered dawn," which are supposed to help the verse and faciliate
memorizing.  Germanic kennings - somewhat similar in nature and function -
are often deliberately obscure or fantastically metaphorical, e.g.,
Anglo-Saxon "whale road" 'sea' or "spear field" 'battlefield'.

This is not my area and the claims and examples are coming from far back
in my memory, so I may be way off here.

> As far as I have been able to tell there are no or very few rhyming
> sayings in Lakota. Even the lyrics of the numerous songs don't have
> rhymes; they usually have the typical syncopative strophe endings or the
> neighboring strophes end with identical enclitics. But I find no "real"
> rhymes anywhere.
>
> Therefore, I have been wondering whether the lack of rhyme in Lakota is
> caused by its morphological and syntactic structure ...

This would be my guess.  The ends of clauses, hence the ends of lines,
tend to be morphologically constrained in ways that make rhyme either
mandatory or impossible, depending on the clauses, and so not interesting
or easily manipulated.

I'd suspect that rhyme would be more satifactory in languages which have
free word order and simple word-final morphology or none.

> What are your experiences with rhymes in other Siouan languages?

I haven't run into it in Omaha, but truthfully I am pretty much out of my
depth with Omaha songs.  I can only pick out occasional words and I'm at
sea with musical structure.  I generally enjoy what I hear, but I don't
hear it enough to grasp the patterns.

I mention songs automatically, because they do have a metrical structure,
though I'm not sure that the lyrics do.  I think definitely not, in fact.
Hence the vocables and other elaborate phrasing techniques, to fit the
lyrics to the melody.

I have seen attempts to analyze Siouan literature as verse but I haven't
been especially convinced by any of them.  There is definitely a structure
to higaN (or is it hikkaN?) stories, especially when well told, and this
seems to me to go beyond the 4x rule, serially applied, but I think this
structure is more a matter of balance and organization and presentational
style than verse, and I don't think there's any metrical element at all.
A well told story comes across more like a well-written essay rather than
a sonnet.  Everything is organized just so.  There's never any "oh, by the
way, I forgot to say" or "and then, um, I guess" and parallelisms and
lacks of parallelism flow elegantly in a way that has to be a result of
calculation and practice.