Entertainment / Literature / Quantitative Meter: Meter that relies not on the alternation of heavily stressed or lightly stressed syllables, but rather on the alternation of 'long syllables' and 'short syllables' (i.e., syllables categorized accordingly to the time interval it takes for the human mouth to pronounce the syllable). For instance, under this scheme, in English, the word hour and at are both one-syllable words of similar stress. However, the word hour takes slightly longer to shape in the mouth than the more terse word at. We might thus call the word hour a 'long syllable' and the word at a 'short syllable.' This label contrasts with the most common use of the terms in regular meter, which relies upon how heavy the stress is in each syllable. Quantitative meter has never worked well in Germanic languages like English, but it was common in Latin, Greek, Sanskirt, and Arabic poetry. Contrast with qualitative meter.
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Entertainment / Literature / Qualitative Meter: Meter that relies on patterns of heavily stress syllables and lightly stressed meters. In English, most poems are qualitative in nature. This contrasts with quantitative meter (below), which was commo MORE
Entertainment / Music / Quadruple Meter: Basic metrical pattern of four beats to a measure: also common time. MORE