Quantitative Meter Research Articles

Sound of Quantitative Metres in Medieval Hebrew Poetry

Abstract The conventional view of quantitative metres in medieval Hispano-Hebrew poetry confuses vowels and syllables. This is because it was syllable structure, rather than vowel typology, that produced the quantitative oppositions. Vocalic shewa was not a furtive but a regular short vowel; its syllable was light because it was not closed by a consonant. Heavy syllables were formed by closing consonants, replaceable by a long vowel, as in Arabic and other languages. Arabic metres could be used in Hebrew with no modification of their phonological basis. However, the quantitative prosody of Arabic poetry was the same as in Qurʾānic recitation, whereas its application to Hebrew contradicted the accentual prosody of the Bible. This appears to be the reason for the controversy surrounding the introduction of Arabic metrics into Hebrew poetry. Quantitative metres require only the focus on the articulatory structures to become audible. Musical durations and accents can corroborate the metre, but they can also be non-related without compromising metre perception.

Meter in Traditional Kakataibo Chants

This paper studies the principal aspects of meter of three traditional Kakataibo chants (a Panoan group of Peruvian Amazonia). Regarding meter, Kakataibo chants exhibit patterns relevant for the cross-linguistic study of line and meter typology. I describe the Kakataibo system of versification as a quantitative meter that counts an exact number of moras and regulates the distribution of these by imposing grouping restrictions; also, it establishes weight differences between light, heavy and superheavy syllables, and vowel lengthening plays an important role for meter purposes. In addition, the average duration of lines tends to last less than three seconds and decreases progressively during performance.

Актуальные статистические показатели о рассмотрении гражданских и административных дел в их денежном выражении (на основе некоторых официальных статистических данных 2016–2019 гг., первых шести месяцев 2020 г.)

The most popular indicators of civil proceedings in the courts of general jurisdiction are quantitative meters, which allow to analyze their number and categories. However, no less interest, from the point of view of the very essence of the civilistic process, is the construction of dynamic series reflecting the economic interests of its participants. Some general conclusions about the trends of the last three years can be realized in monetary equivalent.

Semiotic hybridization in Persian poetry and Iranian music

Abstract This article demonstrates how Iranian classical music and Persian medieval poetry, taken as separate semiotic systems, form together, in certain contexts, a single hybrid semiotic system with overlapping structural features and shared aesthetic principles. Hjelmslev’s description of connotative semiotic systems serves as a theoretical framework to show the modalities of this hybridization. This phenomenon can be observed through comparative analysis of the interdependence of poetry and music in the Persianate World from a semiotic point of view. On the one hand, the quantitative (chronemic) meter of the Persian classical versification, called ‘aruz, as well as its extraordinarily heavy use of rhyme display a formal structure that evokes that of a musical phrase. On the other hand, the dependence of the structure of the Iranian musical system upon the rhythmic structure of classical poetry suggests a unique character of which few examples exist. This interdependence manifests itself particularly in the mystic (Sufi) poetry of the medieval period, specifically in the work of such renowned poets as Rumi, Sa’di Shirāzi, and Hāfez, who are among the best-known in the West. Examples of their lyric works are examined here to demonstrate occurrences of the collusion between the two semiotic systems.

Performance of commercially-available cholesterol self-tests

Background Hypercholesterolemia (plasma cholesterol concentration ≥5.2 mmol/L) is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and stroke. Many different cholesterol self-tests are readily available at general stores, pharmacies and web shops. However, there is limited information on their analytical and diagnostic performance. Methods We included 62 adult patients who required a lipid panel measurement (cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL), triglycerides and LDLcalc) for routine care. The performance of five different cholesterol self-tests, three quantitative meters ( Roche Accutrend Plus, Mission 3-in-1 and Qucare) and two semi-quantitative strip tests ( Veroval and Mylan MyTest), was assessed according to the manufacturers’ protocol. Results The average plasma cholesterol concentration was 5.2 ± 1.2 mmol/L. The mean absolute relative difference (MARD) of the five cholesterol self-tests ranged from 6 ± 5% ( Accutrend Plus) to 20 ± 12% ( Mylan Mytest). The Accutrend Plus cholesterol meter showed the best diagnostic performance with a 92% sensitivity and 89% specificity. The Qucare and Mission 3-in-1 are able to measure HDL concentrations and can thus provide a cholesterol:HDL ratio. The Passing-Bablok regression analyses for the ratio showed poor performance in both self-tests ( Mission 3-in-1: y = 1.62x–1.20; Qucare: y = 0.61x + 1.75). The Accutrend Plus is unable to measure the plasma high-density lipoprotein concentration. Conclusions/interpretation: The Accutrend Plus cholesterol meter (Roche) had excellent diagnostic and analytic performance. However, several of the commercially-available self-tests had considerably poor accuracy and diagnostic performance and therefore do not meet the required qualifications, potentially leading to erroneous results. Better regulation, standardization and harmonization of cholesterol self-tests is warranted.

ДО ВИЗНАЧЕННЯ ПРОДУКТИВНОСТІ ТА ЕНЕРГОЕФЕКТИВНОСТІ ТРАНСПОРТНИХ ЗАСОБІВ В УМОВАХ МІСЬКОЇ МОБІЛЬНОСТІ

Transport flows, which go through the street-road grid of the city, in combination with external factors that affect their movement, set up the system, the operation of which requires adjustment to optimal modes. The article proposes an approach to evaluate the efficiency of traffic organization in terms of urban mobility according to the criteria of their energy efficiency and productivity. The approach is based on the principles of morphological analysis of the traffic flow system, which identifies five main functional elements of the system: car, traffic flow, road, traffic controls and traffic environment. Twenty-two significant morphological features, both quantitative and qualitative, have been identified for morphological elements, for which variants of their implementation have been set. Quantitative meters have been identified for qualitative features, which will allow the synthesis of typical system structures and determine their optimal modes of operation. The total number of possible structures of the system reaches 1,7496·1014. The morphological characteristics unambiguously correspond to the parameters of the system of objective functions, the increments of which during the solution of the optimization problem are components of the integrated criterion of vehicle efficiency. Driving vehicles in optimal conditions will reduce energy consumption and increase their productivity, reduce traffic congestion, improve the environmental condition of the roadside environment and reduce the level of road hazards. The results of morphological analysis should be used in the process of statistical analysis of system parameters in order to develop adequate nonlinear mathematical models with set of output parameters to control the current and forecast future conditions of the system at different levels of detail of the road network. KEYWORDS: MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS, TRANSPORT FLOW, EFFICIENCY OF VEHICLES, ENERGY CONSUMPTION, PRODUCTIVITY.

Volume 50 (2020)

Volume 50 (2020)

Christopher Marlowe, Literary History, and the Lyrical Style of Blank Verse

This essay contextualizes the versification of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine among sixteenth-century efforts to reform English vernacular verse on the model of Latin unrhymed quantitative meter. Literary histories of unrhymed verse in the poetic and rhetorical theory of Roger Ascham, Gabriel Harvey, and others align the disappearance of unrhymed meter with the fall of civilizations and propose a return to classical metrics as a means of transferring the cultural and political authority of ancient Rome to Tudor England. Marlowe, however, offers in Tamburlaine an alternative literary history of unrhymed poetry through the formal affordances of blank verse. As an open form, blank verse lends itself to expansive speeches that, in the mouth of Tamburlaine, can paradoxically both produce action and arrest time. The form of blank verse thus resists the imperial teleology of its origins in the classicizing projects of the Tudor humanists. [C.M.]

Remembering Klopstock's Mitausdruck

Remembering Klopstock's Mitausdruck Lea Pao "Wer kennt ihn heute?"1 July, 1805: The Edinburgh Review, one of the most influential magazines of political and literary criticism in nineteenth-century Great Britain, published a review of An Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language (1804), a book on modern and classical versification written by William Mitford. Mitford, an historian of Ancient Greece whom Lord Byron once called "perhaps the best of all modern historians whatsoever,"2 had published a first edition of the book anonymously in 1774. By 1804, Mitford's Inquiry had become a comprehensive treatise on the mechanics of poetic meter. His long-standing interest in the relationship between poetry and music led him to advocate for the organization of verse based on tonality (that is, musical pitch produced by accents or stresses) rather than quantification (counting the number of syllables by measuring their length). While the mechanics of Greek and Latin offer clear rules regarding the harmony of poetic language, Mitford wrote, "for the very different harmony of English verse no rule could be obtained."3 His championing of spoken English as a poetic language for "the cause of English letters" (Mitford n.p.) was, in this way, a contribution to one of the most debated questions of English prosody at the time: should English poets measure their verse by sound or by syllable? The author of the review was William Herbert, a botanist, politician, scholar of poetry, politician, and clergyman. Best known for his work on hybridization and the evolution of bulbous plants, Herbert also cultivated a keen interest in poetry. He had just published a curious Greek translation of Ossian's Latin poem "Darthula" in 1801, followed by a selection of Icelandic and old Scandinavian poetry in English translation.4 In his lengthy review of Mitford's book, Herbert passionately contested Mitford's argument that Latin verse is "regulated solely by certain dispositions of quantities,"5 arguing that it ignores the importance of accents as a means of regulating classical meter. This was the starting point of Herbert's somewhat bitter general assessment of modern verse, especially of the kind written by poets who confuse accent and quantity and as a result produce "faulty" poetry. Among the worst offenders of such verse, Herbert wrote, was Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. "Klopstock, whose reputation is perhaps undeservedly great," Herbert wrote, "has prefixed to his Messiah a treatise upon that disgusting abortion, which is called the German hexameter."6 Modern reinventions [End Page 101] of the hexameter such as Klopstock's, he argued, were based on the entirely false belief that Latin meter is regulated by quantities when, in fact, one can find numerous rules deriving from Latin accentuation. Though there is a great deal to be said about whether the German hexameter is, in fact, an abortion, what interests me in this essay is the claim Herbert makes about Klopstock—or rather the relationship between the generality of a statement such as the one about Klopstock's "undeservedly great reputation" and the particularity of the grounds on which he is rejected. At the time Herbert published his review on An Inquiry—two years after Klopstock's death in 1803—German literature was beginning to make waves among British poets and writers. In the 1790s, William Taylor had published English translations of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris), Christoph Martin Wielands's Göttergespräche (Dialogues of the Gods), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), and Gottfried August Bürger's Lenore (Lenora), contributing to the enthusiastic reception of German Romanticism among British poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge.7 William Herbert observed "the extraordinary hexameter-mania [that] had lately pervaded Germany"8 with concerned disdain. He saw the problem with both Mitford's theory of versification and Klopstock's hexameter not so much as a matter of choosing accentual verse over quantitative meters, but as a misguided linguistic and poetic understanding of how accentuation and quantification work both in Latin and Greek and in English. "All this be nonsense, as unmixed as ever flowed from the pen of man, it deserves some notice," Herbert continued, "as having...

Onsets contribute to syllable weight: Statistical evidence from stress and meter

While some accounts of syllable weight deny a role for onsets, onset-sensitive weight criteria have received renewed attention in recent years (e.g. Gordon 2005, Topintzi 2010). This article presents new evidence supporting onsets as factors in weight. First, in complex stress systems such as those of English and Russian, onset length is a significant attractor of stress both in the lexicon and in nonce probes. This effect is highly systematic and unlikely, it is argued, to be driven by analogy alone. Second, in flexible quantitative meters (e.g. in Sanskrit), poets preferentially align longer onsets with heavier metrical positions, all else being equal. A theory of syllable weight is proposed in which the domain of weight begins not with the rime but with the p-center (perceptual center) of the syllable, which is perturbed by properties of the onset. While onset effects are apparently universal in gradient weight systems, they are weak enough to be usually eclipsed by the structure of the rime under categorization. This proposal therefore motivates both the existence of onset weight effects and the subordination of the onset to the rime with respect to weight.

Accentual Rhythm in Ovid, Amores I

This paper uses the first book of Ovid’s Amores to explore the rhythms created by the relationship between quantitative meter and word-accents in Latin elegiac poetry. The first part explains how my analysis of the word-accents in relation to the quantitative meter reveals a single basic rhythm underlying the whole of each hexameter and pentameter line. The second part of this paper gives some examples of how attention to this pattern and its variations can be applied practically to illuminate additional layers of meaning in Ovid’s poetry.

Hymns as Acclamations: The Case of Ambrose of Milan

The hymns of Ambrose of Milan may usefully be seen in the context of other forms of rhythmic chant and song found in the social world of the Roman Empire: above all, they may be connected with popular songs and with acclamations, whether theatrical, political, or religious. Ambrose's hymns in particular share with songs and acclamations a number of formal features, being regular in form and based on accentual stress patterns rather than quantitative meter, and being similarly intended for popular and untrained participation. The most important parallel, however, lies in what may be called their function or effect: for just as did songs and acclamations, Ambrose's hymns demonstrated and articulated the unity of a diverse population by allowing the constituents to express themselves in a single voice. What the hymns may have lacked in spontaneity—being complex and pre-composed—they gained in direction and discipline, so that Ambrose was able to exploit the unity and harmony of his congregation in support of his own political and religious aims. Ambrose's hymns thus reconfigured songs and acclamations as a means of establishing and promoting a Milanese Christian identity and of affirming his own popular authority and legitimacy.

Thomas Campion’s iambic and quantitative Sapphic: Further evidence for phonological weight in Elizabethan English quantitative and non-quantitative meters

Fulfilling a central goal of a generation of Elizabethan English metrical theory often referred to as the ‘quantitative movement’, Thomas Campion succeeded in demonstrating the role of syllable quantity, or phonological weight, in Elizabethan iambic pentameter. Following Kristin Hanson (2001, 2006), this article parses Campion’s scansions of Early Modern English syllables, according to moraic theory, into resolved moraic trochees. The analysis demonstrates that (1) Campion distinguished between syllable weight (syllable quantity) and stress or strength (accent) in Early Modern English; (2) Campion prohibited syllabic consonants in English iambic pentameter, despite the fact that they were attested in Early Modern English as a whole; (3) in a successful adaptation of the Latin rule of ‘position’, as described by William Lily and John Colet’s Short Introduction of Grammar (1567), Campion re-syllabified coda consonants followed by vowels; and (4) Campion employed syllabic elision as a means of avoiding pyrrhic syllable combinations that resulted in non-maximal filling of long positions in a line of English iambic pentameter. His two iambic pentameters – the ‘pure’ and the ‘licentiate’ – are both accentual and quantitative meters that, in accordance with moraic theory, integrate stress and strength with syllable weight. He contrasted stress and weight in the quantitative Sapphic lyric ‘Come let us sound with melodie’ (Campion, 1601). Hanson’s (2001, 2006) reconsideration of the role of syllable quantity in Elizabethan metrical theory and Elizabethan poetry should be continued.

Yati, a Structural Principle in Old Javanese Versification

AbstractThe principle of yati, divisions of the metrical arrangement of the quantitative meters of Sanskrit at line-end or at specified points internal to the line (pada), has often been likened to caesura in meters of the European tradition, and in the Indian tradition to a "break in recitation". However, in a principled study of the subject Pollock (1977) has shown that when line-internal yati is specified for one of the quantitative meters it is in fact linked to the arrangement of syntactic units within the line, and not to any suprasegmental aspect of versification, like intonation or the control of phrasing in terms of units of 'breath'. Based on this reasoning Pollock has been able to demonsrate a progression in the Indian tradition from "monotonic" uses of yati in Aśvaghosa, through the effects of "suspension" achieved by Kālidāsa and a movement towards "dissonance" in the works of later stylists like Bhavabhūti Rājaśekhara, Bhattanārāyana, Murāri and Bilhana, where a drive towards transcendence of the constraints of yati is very much in evidence. Given that the majority of meters of the Old Javanese kakawin genre are based on the quantitative meters of the Indian Kāvya, it is natural to suppose that line-internal yati may have been preserved in some of the Old Javanese quantitative meters. This study is devoted to an examination of this question for a selection of the Indian quantitative meters adopted for use in the kakawin, and for a further set of Indo-Javanese meters that follow the isosyllabic requirements of the Indian system, but were developed by Javanese stylists of the kakawin. Special attention is given to the meter Śārdūlavikrīdita, a meter important in Pollock's (1977) study of yati in the Indian tradition and also of great popularity in the Javano-Balinese tradition, and to the Indo-Javanese meter Jagaddhita.

Cantus Planus in the Reformation

This essay explores the reform of cantus planus (the medieval practice of plainchant) which lies at the core of the liturgical and musical Reformation though has not yet received due attention. The Renaissance humanists’ critique of cantus planus is based on their conception of ancient ecclesiastical chant built upon the union of music and speech, viz., the ‘modulated recitation‘. The syllabic declamation and the quantitative metres of ancient Greek music were of essential importance to the humanists’ reforming programme of cantus planus. This centred on the matter of the intelligibility of the text in liturgical music. The essay illustrates the humanist characteristic of the Reformation chants, examining ways in which the classical paradigm of music was reconfigured in the new chant compositions.

Quantitative meter in English: the lesson of Sir Philip Sidney

The Renaissance experiments in quantitative meter in English pose a long-standing puzzle: not only have their specific principles of composition proved elusive; so has any more general explanation of their ultimate failure. This article argues that the solution to the puzzle lies in interactions of quantity and stress in both the meter and the language. An analysis of the dactylic hexameter as based on moraic trochees explains why stress is more straightforwardly accommodated by some positions than others. Analyses of stress-induced ambiguities in English syllable quantity such as the resyllabification of intervocalic consonants in C[V acute]C[V times over] contexts explain apparent inconsistencies in scansion. When these complexities are taken into account, Sidney's compositions reveal themselves to be systematic and phonologically well founded; ambiguities are acknowledged and the meter is exploited to structure them. Ultimately, however, such ambiguities mean that quantity alone provides an inadequate basis for meter in English, because it underdetermines the metrical possibilities.

On Translating Keter Malkhut

On Translating Keter Malkhut Adena Tanenbaum A Crown for the King: Solomon Ibn Gabirol. Translated from the Hebrew by David R. Slavitt. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, xii + 88 pp. The Andalusian Hebrew poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were formidably accomplished. Talmud scholars and dayyanim, biblical exegetes and grammarians, Neoplatonic philosophers, physicians, and astronomers, they epitomized the broad, curricular ideals of their unique Judeo-Arabic culture. The wide-ranging learning and life experience of these so-called courtier-rabbis informs their vast corpus of Hebrew poetry, sacred and secular. When they pour out their devotions, they blend traditional Jewish piety with philosophical meditations on the human soul, or descriptions of the universe drawn from Greco-Arabic cosmology. When they contemplate the fleeting pleasures and evanescence of human life, they mine [End Page 349] biblical wisdom literature alongside Arabic gnomic poetry. And when they celebrate erotic love or the joys of imbibing, they voice worldly themes and motifs inspired by their Arabic courtly models in the language and imagery of Scripture, playfully subverting the original sense of the sacred text. Transposing these splendid creations into English is a di3cult, exacting task. To most contemporary readers, the poems are products of an unfamiliar and distant cultural milieu. Andalusian aesthetic ideals demanded a formal prosody and classical diction that are no longer in vogue. The verse is virtuosic, written in pure biblical Hebrew. It is replete with biblical allusions whose artfully modified resonances would have been recognized and appreciated by medievals raised on Scripture, but are often lost on modern audiences. At the same time, it adapts and naturalizes Arabic quantitative meters, rhyme schemes, and rhetorical devices, furnishing complex sound patterns, tightly knit and carefully balanced lines, and intricate wordplays that are virtually impossible to reproduce in English. Like the talmudic query Keitsad merakedim lifnei hakallah-How does one praise the bride when dancing before her?-translation poses a dilemma. Does one adhere cautiously to the original, or does one embellish judiciously? (The School of Shammai held that one should not enhance the truth, while the School of Hillel insisted that every bride deserves to be called beautiful and graceful.)1 Should one translate into clear prose, to preserve the meaning as faithfully as possible? Or does one craft a verse rendition whose stylistic refinement parallels the effect of the original, but takes liberties with the wording? Each translator grapples with the often incompatible demands of fidelity: to the form, sense, tone, register, texture, and impact of the poem. And, aware that complete fidelity is unattainable, each makes certain sacrifices and takes certain liberties. The publication of David Slavitt's A Crown for the King affords an opportunity to reflect on a recent spate of translations. Characterized by a broad range of approaches and philosophies, these renderings may nevertheless be divided into prose and verse. The former group includes Leon Weinberger's Twilight of a Golden Age, which presents a generous selection of Abraham Ibn Ezra's sacred and secular poetry. Despite their stanzaic layout, Weinberger's English versions are direct, matter-of-fact translations that forgo not only rhyme and meter, but even less rigorously formal features such as rhythm, syntactic inversions, or internal and near-rhymes.2 [End Page 350] By contrast, T. Carmi's recently reissued Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse displays a keen sensitivity to language. A poet in his own right, Carmi favors clear and unadorned prose translations that hew closely to the original without becoming slavishly literal. His stated goal-admirably met-is "to render the poems idiomatically and to capture something of their tone and movement, without betraying' their literal level."3 Yet, in dispensing with formal niceties, even Carmi's fine English versions cannot suggest the carefully crafted shape, texture, or cadences of the Hebrew. His continuous prose lines are accurate and unaffected but give no inkling of the symmetrical, self-contained, end-rhymed stichs so beloved of the poets. Among those who opt for verse translation, there is also a rich variety of approaches. At one end of the spectrum, Raphael Loewe notes that, like Christians who spoke European vernaculars but wrote poetry in Latin, the Andalusian Hebrew poets conversed...

Can tracking of contrast echocardiographic targets be used to measure intracardiac flow velocities?

Recent studies suggest that the slopes of linearly moving echocardiographic contrast targets (microbubbles) can be used to predict flow velocities in the right heart. The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of velocities measured with contrast echocardiography by comparing them with those recorded with a previously calibrated quantitative range-gated 2-dimensional echocardiographic Doppler flow meter. Venous saline echocardiographic contrast injections and Doppler studies were performed in 10 patients, aged 6 months to 16 years, who had been operated on for lesions in the left side of the heart. Blood velocities were measured on a Doppler flow meter along the direction of flow in the main pulmonary artery just distal to the pulmonary valve in a short-axis plane. Immediately after the Doppler study, an M-mode echocardiogram of the pulmonary valve was derived from the same plane as that used for the preceding Doppler sample volume, passing through the pulmonary valve; 2 to 10 ml of normal saline solution was forcefully hand-injected through a previously positioned peripheral venous line and recorded on strip chart and videotape at a paper speed of 100 mm/s. Pulmonary flow velocities by contrast echocardiography were measured as the slopes of the moving contrast echocardiographic targets seen just beyond the pulmonary valve leaflets. Measurable microbubbles had to follow the constraints described in a previous study by Shiina et al. 3 Doppler velocities were read directly from the machine calibration marks (centimeters per second) recorded with the fast Fourier output. Instantaneous and peak velocities were determined at time-matched systolic points in cardiac cycles of identical R-R intervals. Significant but low level correlations were found between contrast echocardiography and Doppler instantaneous (r = +0.45) or peak (r = +0.11) systolic velocities. Our results suggest that while contrast echocardiographic microbubbles can be measured to yield a velocity, they do not behave like moving red blood cells that reflect ultrasound to produce a Doppler shift. Therefore, contrast echocardiography cannot be used reliably to measure flow velocities in the right heart.

The Bedraggled Cupid: Ovidian Satire in ‘Carmina Burana’ 105

Ovid's exceptional popularity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is past dispute; the exact nature of his influence, however, is somewhat less clear. The medieval student first read Ovid early in his career at cathedral schools such as Orléans and Chartres, where his teacher taught him that the classical poets were wise and learned authorities who could offer a Christian much profitable instruction (in Ovid's case, this interpretation involved a considerable distortion, to which we shall return). The student also learned that imitating the Roman authors was a safe and respectable course to follow. As far as Ovid is concerned, medieval poets learned their lessons well. Whether writing in classical, quantitative meters or in medieval, accentual ones, the poets, when they turn to love, sing in the Ovidian vein.

Some observations on Estonian and Russian versification

My paper deals with some problems involved in the transfer of a versification system from one language to anotheran exceedingly common phenomenon. In modern Estonian poetry at least seven different systems of versification are presently current:1 three tonic systems (syllabotonic, accentual, vers libre); three quantitative systems (traditional folk verse; classical quantitative meters used with great success in translations of Greek and Latin poetry, most recently by Ants Oras in a beautiful rendition of Vergil's Bucolics ; and linear-quantitative verse used with equally great success by Aleksis Rannit, a. o.); finally, syllabic verse, which has been used in translations of Romance syllabic poetry with good success. All of these systems, except, of course, that of folk verse, a quantitative trochaic tetrameter, were borrowed at one time or another from the poetry of foreign languages. Today Estonian poetry is flourishing both in Soviet occupied Estonia and in emigration. Emigr/ poets, naturally, gravitate toward the poets of the English-speaking world and the Romance nations. Estonian poets back home are inevitably exposed to a great deal of Russian influence. To begin with, they cannot help becoming familiar with Russian poetry. Many of them translate Russian poetry into Estonian. All the better known Estonian poets are being translated into Russian. Last but not least, the all-pervading pressure of Russification promotes all tendencies toward acculturation, and convergent tendencies in poetry might by expected to be among them. Russian poetry is still dominated by rhymed syllabotonic and accentual verse, while the poetry of the West has largely abandoned traditional metric and rhyming patterns. Therefore, a prevalence in Estonian poetry of rhymed syllabotonic and accentual verse would a priori represent a tendency toward acculturation, while the use of quantitative verse and vers libre would be a tendency in the other direction. In this paper I would like to confront some apparently parallel prosodie traits of Estonian and Russian verse, and try to determine their actual relationship. Let me begin with some statistics. A recent study by J. Pftldmae 2 suggests that in the 19th century 84% of all Estonian Kunstdichtung was still trochaic, and of this 85% in quatrains, 70% with abab rhyme: while in the 20th century, with 71.3% of all poetry syllabotonic, iambs represent 41.5% of the total and trochees a mere 16.8%. I did some counting of my own, using Paul Rummo's large anthology of Estonian poetry (1967) for this purpose.