Editing Syllabic verse (section)

==Overview==
Many European languages have significant syllabic verse traditions, notably Italian, Spanish, French, and the [[Baltic languages|Baltic]] and [[Slavic languages]]. These traditions often permeate both folk and literary verse, and have evolved gradually over hundreds or thousands of years. In a sense, the metrical tradition is older than the languages themselves, since it (like the languages) descended from [[Proto-Indo-European language|Proto-Indo-European]].<ref>Gasparov 1996, chapters 1, 2, 7, and 9; which also serves as the primary source for the following discussion.</ref>

It is often implied,<ref>e.g. Saintsbury, George: ''Historical Manual of English Prosody'', 1910, rpt New York: Schocken Books, 1966, p 14; Fussell, Paul: ''Poetic Meter and Poetic Form'', New York: Random House, 1965, p 7; Turco, Lewis: ''The New Book of Forms'', Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986, p 12.</ref> incorrectly, that [[stress (linguistics)|word stress]] plays no part in the syllabic prosody of these languages. While word stress in most of these languages is much less prominent than in English or German, it is present both in the language and in the meter. Very broadly speaking, syllabic meters in these languages follow the same pattern:

# '''Line length''': The line is defined by the number of syllables it contains.
# '''Hemistich length''': All but the shortest lines are divided into part-lines (''[[hemistich]]s''); each hemistich also contains a specific number of syllables, and ends with a word-boundary (this means that the hemistich cannot end in the middle of a word).
# '''Hemistich markers''': The ends of the hemistichs are marked and contrasted by an obligatory stress: a specific syllable position near the end of each hemistich must be filled by a stressed syllable, and this position typically differs between the first and second hemistich, so that they are audibly distinct.
# '''Marker reinforcement''': Often the syllables immediately before or after the obligatory stresses are obligatorily '''un'''stressed to further emphasize the stress.
# '''Other structure''': Further rules may be imposed, such as additional word-boundary constraints on certain syllabic positions, or allowances for extrametrical syllables; and further interlinear structure may be present (such as [[rhyme]] and [[stanza]]).

Linguistically, the most significant exceptions to this pattern are in [[Latvian language|Latvian]], [[Lithuanian language|Lithuanian]], and [[Serbian language|Serbian]] verse. These verses retain the older quantitative markers using long and short syllables at the ends of hemistichs, instead of stressed and unstressed.

Due to variations in line length, hemistichs, obligatory stress positions, and other factors among verse traditions, and because each language provides words with different rhythmic characteristics, this basic metrical template is realized with great variety. A sequence of syllables that is metrical in one verse tradition will typically not fit in another.

===Perception of syllable count===

Humans can perceive the number of members in a small set without actually counting them or mentally breaking them into subsets, with the upper limit of this ability estimated between 5 and 9 units. This seems to hold true in sequences of audible stimuli (e.g. syllables in a line of verse).<ref>Scott 1993; Gasparov 1996, p 8.</ref> Therefore, it is no surprise that syllabic hemistichs tend to be very short (typically 4 to 8 syllables), and to be grouped and separated from their neighbors by markers like stress, word boundaries, and rhyme.