Daina (Latvia) - Poetic Metre and Its Limitations

Poetic Metre and Its Limitations

The trochaic metre is most popular with around 95% of dainas being in it. Characteristic to this metre is that an unstressed syllable follows stressed syllable, two syllables forming one foot. Two feet form a dipody and after every dipody there is a caesura, which cannot be in the middle of the word. The dainas traditionally are written down so that every line contains two dipodies. If caesura is followed by three syllables, the last syllable i.e. at end of line, is long, if four syllables follow it is short. Syllable is considered short, if it contains short vowel or short vowel and s, all other syllables are considered long. This results in rather limited vocabulary as dipody can consist of either one four syllable word, two two syllable words, one one syllable and one three syllable word or two one syllable and one two syllable word. Exceptions are mostly found in Eastern Latvian dialects, which allow words to start one syllable before or after where caesura normally would be, thus allowing five syllable combinations. This inconsistency is usually found only in one or two lines, most often in second or forth. The notion of short and long syllables at end of lines is retained. However syllable after lost caesura is often unstressed as it is in everyday speech. Elsewhere to increase vocabulary a sound may be added or removed. In particular addition of sounds is explained with structural changes in language itself (loss of vowel in word endings). The sound added at end of the word usually is I, in some rare cases also A, U or E (the later mostly at some regions of Courland). Occasionally both contraction occurs and I is inserted instead of diminutive ending in I i.e. the ending is retained, but separated from the rest of the word by caesura. This can be perhaps explained by diminutives being so popular in dainas that people didn't find it appropriate to replace it with the same word without it, which would be a syllable shorter. However the opposite also might be true with diminutive being added to increase number of syllables, even when meaning of words is quite opposite to what usually is expressed with diminutive. Similarly the need to match the metric might cause disagreement in tenses.