4 ms·

I'm not well read, and don't think I'd be able to finish any of the classics. As such I have no clue what "slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter" me

by ifh-hn 11mo ago

I'm not well read, and don't think I'd be able to finish any of the classics. As such I have no clue what "slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter" means. I came here for the robots.

baruz 11mo ago
Not with that attitude you won’t! But dip your toe in, _Pride and prejudice_ is pretty light and breezy while having some depth to it.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- ifh-hn 11mo ago
  I don't know. All I remember from school is absolutely hating being forced to read, and understand/interpret, thing like shakespeare and Jane Austin. But then again I now like a lot of the vegetables I used to hate as a kid... My daughter loves the classics, me, science fiction and fantasy.
  - Tarsul 11mo ago
    Just read Treasure Island. It's a classic but one that is easy to comprehend and also timeless.
  - baruz 11mo ago
    _Pride and prejudice_ hits for me similar notes as those for fantasy and historical fiction, though of course it is commenting on contemporary issues with no magic (except the magic of love), alas. It’s like entering a foreign society where you may have to infer why people are acting the way they do. Now that you’re not in school, no one is forcing you to write essays on what you read, or even to understand or interpret what is going on in the narrative! Cool, huh?
altairprime 11mo ago
You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and imagine that instead of him bursting into musical song, he burst into chanting a limerick: There once was a demi-god, Maui / Amazing and awesome: I’m Maui // Who stole you your fire / and made your days lighter // Yes, thank you, you’re welcome! Love: Maui It’s a bit odd of an analogy, but limericks and “Iambic pentameter” are specific instances of an underlying language architectural thing, so it should be just enough to convey the basics of that “prose to Iambic” sentence. And: if you’ve ever watched “Much Ado About Nothing” from the mid-90s, that’s 100% Iambic. (If you’re an English major, yes, I know, this is all wrong; it’s just a one-off popsicle-sticks context-unique mindset-conveyance analogy-bridge, not step-by-step directions to lit/ling coordinates in your field.)
- gabriel666smith 11mo ago
  This is a great example, and not odd as an analogy at all. It surfaces something subtle. Language architecture is really interesting, I think, for programmers who have bought into the LLM hype in any meaningful way. It's an important field to have a sense of. Tokenizers, for example, generally have multi-syllabic tokens as their base-level, indivisible unit. You rarely see this mentioned when LLM capability against non-coding tasks is discussed, despite it being deeply important for prose construction. Not to mention, putting language models aside, that the vast majority of code is written in language with a logical grammar. The disciplines are highly linked.
  - altairprime 11mo ago
    The Judoon have such a lovely language, though!
  - regularfry 11mo ago
    The AI generated front page of HN posted yesterday had some generated comments in at least one of the threads that scanned and rhymed. It's clearly there in whatever model that was, and while it might just have been a confluence of having seen a specific word pair a certain distance apart in the learning data to account for the rhyming, I'm having a hard time explaining away the construction of a coherent meter.
justonceokay 11mo ago
It’s like incel mentality except applied to literacy
keymasta 11mo ago
Two broad categories, verse and prose. Prose is mostly focused on describing meaning using any words that serve to do so. Verse is more concerned with structural factors like rhythm, tonality, and structure within syllables, or within types of sound, or parts of speech. Other linguistic devices which look at details beyond the strict meaning of the words, like rhyme or many other factors (you could even use visual spacing for example) can be considered in verse. Within verse there's the concept of iambs. I think of it as a tuple of two syllables which are said, weak-strong. Pentameter means ten syllables, and iambic means in groups of weak and strong. Most of Shakespeare is written like this. Also English naturally sounds iambic a lot of the time. Iambic pentameter sounds like this: I watched a bird attempt its beak upon The end of fake too-moist baguette in vain For it was sick of stale McDicks tossed on It endlessly maintained its rationed pain While others in its bobbing flock for scraps Of birds fought for the thrill squawked on and on Till cannibals among their kind rejoiced To find cousins in mayonnaise so long Normally you'd also look at rhyme structure if writing a legit Shakespearean sonnet [2] but I fired this one out as in the style of fast food. So this is technically iambic pentameter but not technically a sonnet. Or like a particular Shakespearean sonnet [0]. Or like any of them, [1] [0] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnet.I.html https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnet.I.html [1] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnets.html https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnets.html [2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/shakespearean-sonnet https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/shakespe...
- SAI_Peregrinus 11mo ago
  Minor nitpick: "pentameter" means 5 parts, and each part is an iamb in iambic pentameter, so it's 5 parts where each part is 2 syllables in a weak-strong pattern. That results in 10 syllables, but "pentameter" doesn't mean 10 syllables alone.

by ifh-hn 11mo ago

I'm not well read, and don't think I'd be able to finish any of the classics. As such I have no clue what "slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter" means. I came here for the robots.

baruz 11mo ago

Not with that attitude you won’t! But dip your toe in, _Pride and prejudice_ is pretty light and breezy while having some depth to it.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
ifh-hn 11mo ago
I don't know. All I remember from school is absolutely hating being forced to read, and understand/interpret, thing like shakespeare and Jane Austin. But then again I now like a lot of the vegetables I used to hate as a kid... My daughter loves the classics, me, science fiction and fantasy.
- Tarsul 11mo ago
  Just read Treasure Island. It's a classic but one that is easy to comprehend and also timeless.
- baruz 11mo ago
  _Pride and prejudice_ hits for me similar notes as those for fantasy and historical fiction, though of course it is commenting on contemporary issues with no magic (except the magic of love), alas. It’s like entering a foreign society where you may have to infer why people are acting the way they do. Now that you’re not in school, no one is forcing you to write essays on what you read, or even to understand or interpret what is going on in the narrative! Cool, huh?

altairprime 11mo ago

You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and imagine that instead of him bursting into musical song, he burst into chanting a limerick: There once was a demi-god, Maui / Amazing and awesome: I’m Maui // Who stole you your fire / and made your days lighter // Yes, thank you, you’re welcome! Love: Maui It’s a bit odd of an analogy, but limericks and “Iambic pentameter” are specific instances of an underlying language architectural thing, so it should be just enough to convey the basics of that “prose to Iambic” sentence. And: if you’ve ever watched “Much Ado About Nothing” from the mid-90s, that’s 100% Iambic. (If you’re an English major, yes, I know, this is all wrong; it’s just a one-off popsicle-sticks context-unique mindset-conveyance analogy-bridge, not step-by-step directions to lit/ling coordinates in your field.)

gabriel666smith 11mo ago
This is a great example, and not odd as an analogy at all. It surfaces something subtle. Language architecture is really interesting, I think, for programmers who have bought into the LLM hype in any meaningful way. It's an important field to have a sense of. Tokenizers, for example, generally have multi-syllabic tokens as their base-level, indivisible unit. You rarely see this mentioned when LLM capability against non-coding tasks is discussed, despite it being deeply important for prose construction. Not to mention, putting language models aside, that the vast majority of code is written in language with a logical grammar. The disciplines are highly linked.
- altairprime 11mo ago
  The Judoon have such a lovely language, though!
- regularfry 11mo ago
  The AI generated front page of HN posted yesterday had some generated comments in at least one of the threads that scanned and rhymed. It's clearly there in whatever model that was, and while it might just have been a confluence of having seen a specific word pair a certain distance apart in the learning data to account for the rhyming, I'm having a hard time explaining away the construction of a coherent meter.

justonceokay 11mo ago

It’s like incel mentality except applied to literacy

keymasta 11mo ago

Two broad categories, verse and prose. Prose is mostly focused on describing meaning using any words that serve to do so. Verse is more concerned with structural factors like rhythm, tonality, and structure within syllables, or within types of sound, or parts of speech. Other linguistic devices which look at details beyond the strict meaning of the words, like rhyme or many other factors (you could even use visual spacing for example) can be considered in verse. Within verse there's the concept of iambs. I think of it as a tuple of two syllables which are said, weak-strong. Pentameter means ten syllables, and iambic means in groups of weak and strong. Most of Shakespeare is written like this. Also English naturally sounds iambic a lot of the time. Iambic pentameter sounds like this: I watched a bird attempt its beak upon The end of fake too-moist baguette in vain For it was sick of stale McDicks tossed on It endlessly maintained its rationed pain While others in its bobbing flock for scraps Of birds fought for the thrill squawked on and on Till cannibals among their kind rejoiced To find cousins in mayonnaise so long Normally you'd also look at rhyme structure if writing a legit Shakespearean sonnet [2] but I fired this one out as in the style of fast food. So this is technically iambic pentameter but not technically a sonnet. Or like a particular Shakespearean sonnet [0]. Or like any of them, [1] [0] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnet.I.html https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnet.I.html [1] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnets.html https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnets.html [2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/shakespearean-sonnet https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/shakespe...

SAI_Peregrinus 11mo ago
Minor nitpick: "pentameter" means 5 parts, and each part is an iamb in iambic pentameter, so it's 5 parts where each part is 2 syllables in a weak-strong pattern. That results in 10 syllables, but "pentameter" doesn't mean 10 syllables alone.