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This is . . . not how rhymes work.
Would you like to learn how rhymes really work? Of course you would! So let's talk about syllables and stress. https://twitter.com/netflix/status/1326557538570002432
Would you like to learn how rhymes really work? Of course you would! So let's talk about syllables and stress. https://twitter.com/netflix/status/1326557538570002432
Pretty much every learned how to count syllables in elementary school. A simple way of thinking about syllables is just that every "beat" in a word is a syllable. You clap along as you say a word, and that helps you figure out where the syllables are and how many there are.
So "friend" has one syllable because you say it in one beat, while "principal" has three: prin-ci-pal. (Of course, some words will vary from one variety of English to another or one person to another. Some people say "caramel" with three syllables and some with two.)
But syllables themselves have their own structure. We can break them into two parts, for starters: the onset and the rhyme. The onset is the initial consonant or cluster of consonants. The rhyme is everything else.
So in the word "strengths", the onset is "str", while the rhyme is "engths". Some syllables don't have onsets, because they don't have any initial consonants, but every syllable has a rhyme.
So a word like "end" just has a rhyme because there's no initial consonant, and the first syllable in "apple" doesn't have one either, because it's just "ap".
In a nutshell, rhyming works when you have two words with the same rhyme but different onsets. That is, "friend" and "end" rhyme because they have the rhyme parts of the syllables are the same but the onsets are different (or, in this case, one is missing the onset).
It feels like cheating if you rhyme "friend" with "friend"—we expect the onsets to be different. Maybe it's still rhyming, but it feels lazy.
But the other important aspect of rhyming is stress. "Emily" and "Paris" (pronounced "Pa-ree" as the French do) technically both end in /i/—that is, they have the same final rhyme—but they don't actually rhyme, because the stresses don't line up.
For words to rhyme, they have to share the same rhyme from the last stressed syllable, AND all subsequent syllables have to be identical.
For example, the words "pleasure" and "treasure" are stressed on the first syllable. The stressed syllables have the same rhyme, the vowel /ɛ/. And the final syllables are identical.
"Emily" is stressed on the first syllable, and that syllable has no onset, so something that rhymes with it would have to end with the sequence "Emily". You may have noticed that the French pronunciation of "Paris" does not end with "Emily".
"But wait!" some people are saying. "If you stress 'Emily' on the last syllable too, then it technically rhymes!"
I mean, okay, fine. But are we really supposed to pronounce "Emily in Paris" as "em-i-LEE in pa-REE"?
I mean, okay, fine. But are we really supposed to pronounce "Emily in Paris" as "em-i-LEE in pa-REE"?
If they really wanted to make that rhyme work, they should have gone with "Marie in Paris". It's not that hard, folks!
There's a type of rhyming called slant rhyme (or imperfect rhyme or a few other terms). It usually involves having similar vowels but different final consonants. It can get pretty fuzzy sometimes, as in this example. https://twitter.com/djsziff/status/1326588540205985792
Wikipedia gives the following example from "N.Y. State of Mind" by Nas:
"And be prosperous, though we live dangerous
Cops could just arrest me, blamin' us, we're held like hostages"
"And be prosperous, though we live dangerous
Cops could just arrest me, blamin' us, we're held like hostages"
"Prosperous", "cops could just", and "hostages" are all slant rhymes, with similar vowels in the stressed syllables and even some similar (though not identical) consonants. They all end with sibilants and also have an /s/ in the end of the stressed syllables.
"Dangerous" and "blamin' us" are also slant rhymes, with the same stressed vowels. They both end in /s/ too, but they have different consonants in the middle.
Basically, the rule for slant rhyme is that there aren't really any rules. But if you want a perfect rhyme, you have to be pretty strict about matching everything from the rhyme of the stressed syllable all the way to the end or it doesn't work.
Side note: A few people have pointed out that French doesn't really have lexical stress. I was taught in my college French classes that it has a weak final stress, but a couple of years of French classes doesn't make me an expert in French phonology. https://twitter.com/moppety/status/1326588636020809729
If there is no lexical stress in French, then I'm not quite sure what the rules are. Is it just the rhyme of the final syllable that has to match?
Ooh, this is interesting. Now I'm wondering how much the rules for rhyming vary from one language to another or one culture to another. I was taught in German class that "ü" rhymes with "i", "ö" with "e", and "eu" with "ai"/"ei" (if I'm remembering right). https://twitter.com/Sonnet_Fitz/status/1326595065356181507
You're all going to send me down a rabbit hole of looking into rhyming rules and other poetry rules in other languages, but I have too much real work to do. :( https://twitter.com/YellsOnPolitics/status/1326631957845975040
