Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/197

 CHAPTER XV

PROSODY

prosody of the Celtic languages is often very elaborate, but the more modern tendency has generally been in the direction of assimilating it to the prosody of English, or, in the case of Breton, to that of French. In Welsh two systems exist at the present day, and the rules of them are known respectively as y Rheolau Caethion and y Rheolau Rhyddion, the bond or strict rules and the free rules. The former are founded on elaborate rules of Cynghanedd or consonance, which term includes alliteration and rhyme, and every imaginable correspondence of consonant and vowel sounds, reduced to a system which Welsh-speaking Welshmen profess to be able to appreciate, and no doubt really can, though it is not easily understood by the rest of the world. The rules of Cynghanedd are applied in various ways to the four-and-twenty metres of the Venedotian (Gwynedd or North Wales) school, and to the metres of the Dimetian (Dyfed or South-West Wales) and the Glamorgan schools. Modern Welsh bards, however, though they often use the strict rules as tours-de-force for Eisteddfod purposes, as often compose poetry according to the free rules, which are mostly the ordinary go-as-you-please metres of the Saxon. The Bretons follow the ordinary French rules as to the strict number of syllables, the caesura, and the rhyming, taking very little account of the stress accent either of words or sentences. 178