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Emporium

A strict phonological definition:

Two words rhyme iff:
a) They are (last) stressed on the same syllable, counting from the end of the words.
and
b) They are pronounced identically from the vowel in their last stressed syllable to their end (using whatever pronounciation you're comfortable with).

So it is that undid and liquid are not rhyming words – I don't think anyone can make a good case for liˈquid or ˈundid. This is a complicating factor that makes English (and Spanish, etc.) poetry loads of fun: think of the difference between reˈcord and ˈrecord. In French, Finnish, Hungarian and Polish, by contrast, you can simply ignore the first rule and in other languages (Latin, anyone?) the stress can be pretty well predicted (once you know the rules) or inferred from the orthography.

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Dominic

Comments

Try Russian for shifting stress. It's a real bastard. Fortunately Russians can understand you even if you've got the word stress wrong (i.e. го'род instead of 'город, 'Тверская instead of Твер'ская), but it still doesn't sound good.

To complicate matters, there are some words in Russian where the lower class accent has a different stress to Standard Russian ('народ instead of на'род). And of course heaps of the time Russian has different stress to other Slavic languages if you learnt them first.

Also, it's 'Yushchenko (Ющенко), not yush-CHENK-o. It's pronounced something like /'juʃɪnkə/ (at least in Russian it is, I'm not an expert on retarded-sounding Ukrainian accents).
robbie
Or Смир'новская 'Водка instead of 'Смирновская 'Водка
robbie
So what languages like their rhymed poetry besides english?
Rhyme in inflected languages seems rather trivial and i know that in Latin poetry it is avoided rather than strived for (though assonance and consonance are nice). Latin and greek poetry is all about the metre, baby.
t r a v
aymar
It's sort of something that Europe decided was cool after the heyday of the Roman Empire... so most of the vernacular languages of Europe think rhyme is a cool idea. French has some crazy systems - their rhyming rules used to be really really bizarre and complex. Shakespeare imported the sonnet from the Italians, etc etc.

Some medieval Latin poems rhyme:
Dies iræ, dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sybilla