Rhythmic and intoned English (with
Wafa Akkouh)
Having lost the former text of this page, due to not being careful, we
will try today to recover it as much as possible. The theme, the subject of
the page consists on describing how to utter correctly English
sentences, that is, describe the prosody of the English language.
Prosody rules two great areas: rhythm and intonation. The first, keeps
syllables and stresses (accents) at regular intervals, running smoothly in
time. This is like music, where notes occur within a measure occupying the
same duration, or multiples and submultiples of a time unit what was called
tempus primus in Latin music (read Aristides Quintiliano in his
excellent treatise on Greek music, on which Latin was based). For
that, poetry is excellent, because the regularity is greater, approaching
speech even more to music. Let's remember a Spanish sonnet belonging to El
Perro del Hortelano, an amusing play by Lope de Vega:
¿Qué
me quieres, amor? ¿Ya no tenía
olvidado a Teodoro? ¿Qué me quieres?
Pero
responderás que tú no eres
sino
tu sombra, que detrás venía.¡Oh celos!
¿Qué no hará vuestra porfía?
Malos letrados sois con las mujeres,
pues jamás os pidieron pareceres
que pudiese el honor guardarse un día.
Yo quiero a un hombre bien, mas se me acuerda
que yo soy mar y que él humilde barco,
y que es contra razón que el mar se pierda.
En gran peligro, amor, el alma embarco,
mas si tanto el honor tira la cuerda,
por Dios, que temo que se rompa el arco. |
Or, similarly, coming back to English, the Shakespeare's sonnet:
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence*
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
Both sonnets follow the same rhythmical pattern, the same metre: the
iambic pentameter, which sounds liketa
1
2
3 4
5
6
7 8
9 10
11 12
ta
tá ta
ta ta
tá ta
ta ta
tá ta
‒
When I
do count the
clock that tells the
time ‒ ‒
¿Qué
me quie res, a mor? ¿Ya no te ní a
‒
Trying to recite in time, with
regularity and without stopping, the previous four line we experience in one
or other aspects difficulties and a errors of synchronicity. We try to reach
the correction in this task by stroking with the hand synchronously with the
syllables. To order all this actions we need to emphasises the main
syllables in the iambic pentameter, which are 2, 6 and 10 (bigger and bold
in the number line).
These problems mean and say to us that intellect alone is
not able to perform in time because it is abstract and tasks in time belong
to the kingdom of life. So neural connections, muscular reactions and flow
of cerebral impulses are necessary to this temporal task, when we are able
to combine all this processes we begin to understand what rhythm means and
we can recite with clarity and beauty, a no menial accomplishment.
* having doubts about the pronunciation of this word we look
in the Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language
where we find 'e' and 'i' as correct choices for the first vowel. By the way
let's write the list of English letters in the alphabetic order:
a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s,
t, u, v, w, x, y, z.
which is slightly different of the Spanish one:
a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p,
q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.
And only to compare let's try to remember the Arabic one:
alif, ba, ta, tha, gym, h.a, kha, dal, thal,
ra, zay, sim, shim, s.ad, d.ad, t.a, z.a, 'ain, ghain, fa, qaf, kaf, lam,
mim, nun, ha, waw, ya, (hamza).
So we count twenty-nine letters if we considered hamza, a
glotal stop, like a letter. Arabic there for have many more sounds tha
Spamish or English except vowels which are less: only three longs or shorts
