lack of rhymes

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

 >>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 correct, yet bear in mind that also ancient Chinese poetry
styles (e.g. Ch'i-Lü/Qilü - an eight-line poem with seven characters per
line and following rigorous prosodic rules - or Chueh-chü/Jueju - a
Quatrain) have to use end-rhymes in certain lines, whereas other styles
are more free and don't have rhymes. In Germanic (and other
Indoeuropean) tongues there is (was) alliteration (Stabreim), free forms
and endrhyme, too, so that one cannot state apodictically that rhyme or
not rhyme is strictly depending on a language's specific structure.

When beginning to study Hungarian poetry, my initial opinion also went
into this direction because of the very special structure of the H
language. And infact the rhyming is a bit special compared to other
languages like e.g. English, German, Chinese, Romanian or what have you
for its feature of agglutinativeness (i.e. the rhyming endings mostly
are grammatical suffixes of limited number). But it works (sounds!) as
well - at least for ears accustomed to the language.
In Hungarian, very often the verb comes last in a sentence (so you often
have the verb endings to carry the rhyme), but not always, and moreover,
in poetry Hungarian syntax is pretty variable and free.
This is very different with Siouan languages, and therefore syntax might
appear to be a certain drawback for endrhyme poetry there. So I tend to
agree with both of you that this can be one reason for the "lack of
rhymes" in Lakota - although endrhyme isn't totally impossible there,
albeit a bit monotonous perhaps. Using the various (but quite limited)
enclitics to bear the rhyme might be well appropriate for lullabies,
childrens' and ceremonial/spiritual songs etc..
(BTW, I too was searching for Lakota pieces of poetry, invain, they're
all in English.)

Alfred