OK and rhymes

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Wallace Chafe wrote:
> I've been a little uncomfortable with the discussion of rhyming, which
> makes it sound like some higher manifestation of artistic sensibility.
> It's actually something that's arisen in certain cultures in certain
> ways, and I don't see any reason to interpret it as an index of a
> culture's degree of sophistication, or whatever.

I certainly didn't intend any notion of cultural superiority to appear in
my part of the discussion of the presence or absence of rhyme, or, for
that matter alliteration, meter, kennings, or proverbs.  Since most of the
discussion was mine, I am probably the guilty party here, and should offer
apologies if this seemed to apply in anything I said.

I plead guilty to one relevant prejudice.  I probably take entirely too
much pleasure in noticing that things my native culture regards as
universal are not.  So I probably dwelt excessively on the "present :
missing" comparisons.  I didn't mean it to be a list of "good : bad" or
"advanced : not advanced" comparisons, but rather a list of "surprise, not
essential" things.

I tried to bolster this by pointing out that in my understanding rhyme is
an imported fashion in European literatures.  Thus, rhyme is not inherent
or original in European practice.  It comes from outside and modifies or
replaces earlier traditions.  Unfortunately, the Middle Eastern cultural
practices introduced into Medieval Europe are characterized as advances in
a historical perspective, and I failed to consider this.

I suppose they are advances in terms of the internal history of European
culture, in which present conditions are always regarded as more advanced
than the past conditions, and "very advanced" means "near contemporary in
form."  In some cases these introductions were advances in science or
medicine, which some of us might regard independent of cultural
considerations.  I'm kind of pre-modernist (primitive?) in this respect
myself.  However, I don't see any culture-independent way to characterize
changes in literary style as advances, and I intend the example of the
introduction of rhyme into Europe in precisely that way.  Poetries can be
+rhyme or -rhyme.  In that perspective, rhyme + meter vs. non-rhyme (or
alliteration) + meter are simply different literary choices of equivalent
value.

Interestingly, I think Siouan and other Native American literatures show
that meter - metrical verse, anyway - is also not universal.  This isn't
to say that Native American music doesn't have strict metrical structure.
I'd be astounded if *that* wasn't universal.

"Native American" really isn't the right term here, since the examples are
really just Siouan, and Siouan from the Plains area at that.  Native
American covers a vast amount of physical and culture territory with
enormous diversity.  The Siouan parts of the Plains are a small fragment
of that.  I'm aware that there are studies that analyse the verse
structure of other Native American literatures, and I'm not disputing that
such things exist.  They may even exist in Plains Siouan, though I haven't
been convinced of it yet.

Of course, when I think that poetry in the European (and Euro-American)
sense might not be universal, I imagine myself plopping this data down in
front of my highschool English teachers and exclaiming "I told you so!"
I say "might not be" because, of course, I'm not convinced this is true.
For one thing, song - music with lyrics - is, I think, universal, and
certainly music generally and song specifically are present in Plains
cultures.  In fact, omnipresent and very lively.  Lyrics might be
considered prima facie evidence that there is poetry, i.e., lyrics are
perhaps necessarily poetry, even if they are written in tradition without
meter or some kind of sound echoes or other such potential universals of
poetry.  And maybe there really are meter or sound echoes, too, even
though I haven't yet noticed them.  Maybe I can fairly say "We haven't yet
noticed them."

"Sound echoes" (meaning things like rhyme or alliteration) explains the
references I made to mn-repetitions and such.  These were intended as
annecdotal evidence that Dakota speakers were as sensitive to such things
esthetically as anyone, and in their native language(s), too, even if such
things weren't elevated to literary conventions.  In other words, rhymes
and other sound echoes may well be universally interesting, even if they
aren't universally singled out for conventional use.

Kind of makes me wonder what Dakota et al. have that English et al. lack.
I suppose the absence of simple correlates to the classifiers must feel
like a rather awkward hole.  Francis LaFlesche is rather marked in his use
of adjectives correlating with the classifiers.  He doesn't say anything
general about the importance of not letting this information get lost, but
I've noticed he tends to insist of the extended forms.