Visiting Sacramento

[krasnoludek]

I just got back from spending the last two days up in Sacramento at my sister's place. My mom has been there too for the last six weeks, so even though things have been busy for me, I decided I should go up to see my mother before she returns to NJ and see my sister, niece and nephew while I'm at it. Ironically, I barely spent any time with my

Comments

[lingboy]

For monosyllabic words, it means that both have the same "rime". A rime is a unit of the syllable consisting of the vowel and the coda (final consonants). So the word "went" and "spent" rhyme because they have equivalent rimes.

For polysyllabic words, it is more complicated. The words "pedantic" and "romantic" rhyme because everything from the rime of the stressed syllable up to the end of the word is the same.

As a side note, the unit "rime" is motivated by LOTS of independent evidence (tone, stress, weight, feature sharing). It wasn't just made up to explain rhyming, although its name is taken from the pattern.

The same principle (I think) holds for Spanish poetry. To quote Francisco Luis Bernández (last two estrofas from Soneto de Amor):

Desde que en este día sin reproche,
desde que en esta noche que no es noche,
desde que en este cielo que destierra,

desde que en esta tierra que no es tierra,
el corazón, ayer deshabitado,
vuelve a ser corazón enamorado.

It may be corny (I actually like it), but note that "deshabitado" has stress on the penultimate syllable (second from last) as well as the word "enamorado." Everything else in the words is different except the stressed vowel and everything that follows the stressed vowel.

[oxeador]

Well, thank you. They way I learned it in Spanish is that two words rhyme if all the sounds from the stressed vowel (or diptongue) to the end are the same. Simple. It is the same as you explain above, right? However, when I have explained this to native English speakers, they always (until now) denied that it was exactly like that in English, yet they could not define how it is instead.