Syllabic Meter in Persian

Syllabic meter is formed by the regular repetition of syllables, pauses (caesurae), and hemistiches. The quantity of syllables as well as their weight have no functional role in the structure of syllabic meter, therefore this meter is substantially different with the Persian quantitative meter in classical poetry and Persian isochronous accentual folk meter which are based mainly on syllable weight and metrical accents respectively. Although the syllabic meter is usually current in such syllable-timed languages as French in which syllables have equal quantities, sometimes, for some historical and or cultural reasons, evidences of syllabic meter have been observed in languages such as Persian in which syllables have different quantities. Syllabic meter, as it has been mentioned already, is not current in Persian at all, but this meter has been used by some poets in Persian from the ancient times to the present day. This paper deals with the structural analysis of such poems. In this article, after a brief discussion on the classification of different meters in world languages, Persian syllabic meter has been introduced and it structural characteristics has been shown as follows: 1. Persian poets, when composing in this meter, make use of mostly long (heavy) syllables; 2. The pauses in this meter are always of caesura types, i.e. it appears always after a phonological word (or prosodic constituent) break; 3. Although the end part of each pause in this poem is accompanied always by a stress, this stress is not a metrical one, but a pitch accent, and this point shows clearly that stress has just a secondary role in the main structure of this meter in Persian. In this article a method has been also introduced for representing and classifying all kinds of Persian syllabic meter.