Jespersen's System
In 1900, Otto Jespersen in his "Notes on Metre" was the first to use a four-stress system. He used the numbers 1 to 4, to indicate varying degrees of stress: strong, half-strong, half-weak, and weak. Steele (1999) and McAuley (1966) both use this as a secondary style of notation. Chomsky and Halle (1968) (in a linguistic, not specifically metrical context) use a similar notation, but in reverse: "1" signifying primary stress, "2" signifying secondary, etc.; some linguistically oriented descriptions of meter published thereafter used this notation, with "1" being the strongest stress.
| Symbol | Syllable Type | Description |
| 4 | Strong | Heavy stress |
| 3 | Half-Strong | Medium Stress |
| 2 | Half-Weak | Medium-Light Syllable |
| 1 | Weak | Light syllable |
Read more about this topic: Systems Of Scansion
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