12 December 2004. I learned some things at HLAS (humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare), a Google discussion group where people argue about who wrote the works of Shakespeare. It was in a thread which "Bookburn" had begun by telling us that "some 900 literary terms and phrases that can be looked up at the following site. There, he had found:
(ONSET) + (RIME) b ig str ong 0 old"It's the zero onsets that alliterate (that's why the vowels in (say) Old English so-called vowels alliteration don't have to be the same or even similar.)"
My contribution to the discussion was to misread Bookburn's comment and go on to spout that, "for me,
alliteration is same sound at beginning of syllables, consonance is same sound at end of
syllables, assonance is same vowel-sound in middle of syllables (or at the beginning of
those with zero onsets)," thinking Bookburn had said elsewise.
I went on to say that if I understood Peter, "and in Old English, 'old' and 'English' have zero onsets (I like that
term, which I hadn't come across before) and therefore are considered to alliterate, I
would call for a new term for it. 'Vowelerate?' It sure isn't alliteration, for me."
In another post I amplified on that: "I mean, in what way does the a-sound
in 'agony' resemble the u-sound in 'ugh' the way the g-sounds in the
two words resemble each other? I do see that vowel-started words have a partial
sound, so to speak, in common, that there should be a word for."
"Yes," I had the temerity to say, "definitions can change, and someone like me has a right to say the dictionaries and/or scholars are not the final authority."
I later coined "semalliteration" for "vowel alliteration," then improved that to "micralliteration." I don't like "vowel alliteration" because it seems to me it'd be too easily confused with the use of the same vowel-sounds when it is simply the use of vowel onsets.
Peter was later good enough to answer a query of mine about what parts of syllables are called, incidentally. "The centre of the syllable (usually a vowel, but occasionally a semi-vowel like /l/ or /n/) is called the nucleus; any trailing consonants constitute the coda; nucleus and coda constitute the rime. More than one consonant in onset or coda is a cluster. The basic structure of the syllable is onset + rime, which is why zero onset is an option; you don't have to have a coda, however, so there are no zero codas, only absences of coda (i.e. consonance requires actual consonants in the coda).
These seem good terms except for "rime" which is too similar to "rhyme," for me. I think I'll call it the "yllable." |
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