Antonyms et al in Arabic. (via Dumbfoundry) 

Every time i see a blog-discussion on prosody, i’m amazed all over again how this musty old topic can still generate confusion, & heat. The basics. But then i remember we’re basically dealing with a situation similar to that in which Classical Latin was revived in the early Renaissance by people who didn’t speak it. (Except that those people bothered to get it right.) It’s not like the versifiers of today even started with the bad poems one can hear on the radio ten times an hour. They start with textbooks, & listening to people read who don’t even stop at the end of their lines (sigh). But i really would like to see one confusion reversed: between ICTUS (beat) & STRESS (which is a relative thing of adjacencies). And poetry in English was always a thing of beats; still is, if you care to listen. The most expert prosodists did things that still can’t be explained by the old GraecoRoman style of analyzing “feet”: i am thinking specifically of W S Gilbert, & his song in The Mikado that goes:

“...awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock/ 
from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block”.
 
Now, you probably have no trouble hearing the change in velocity of each line toward the end. In fact, he goes straight from duple feet (“aWAITing the senSAtion”) to syncopation (“SHORT SHARP SHOCK”) without so much as pausing for a real iamb in between. --These lines can be put into musical notation better than they correspond to the binary analysis of “stressed” & “unstressed”. I think it can be safely said that when the great poets like Shakespeare & Milton & Tennyson had reached the point of being able to speak freely in perfectly regular verse, they did not rest in this mastery, but began to explore polyrhythms & the effects of countering hearers’ expectations. Too bad the teachers of prosody couldn’t follow it!