Edited by
Jonathan Roper
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Alliteration in Culture
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Alliteration in Culture
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Also by Jonathan Roper
CHARMS AND CHARMING IN EUROPE
CHARMS, CHARMERS AND CHARMING:
International Research on Verbal Magic
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ENGLISH VERBAL CHARMS
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Alliteration in Culture
Edited by
Jonathan Roper
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University of Tartu, Estonia
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Selection, Introduction and Editorial Matter © Jonathan Roper 2011
Chapters © their individual authors 2011
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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First published 2011 by
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Alliteration in culture/edited by Jonathan Roper.
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1. Alliteration. I. Roper, Jonathan, 1969–
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No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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This book is for
Ellen Marigold Roper
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Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
x
Notes on the Contributors
xi
Introduction: Key Topics in the Study of Alliteration
Jonathan Roper
1
2
3
4
Love, Silver and the Devil: Alliteration in
English Place-Names
Jeremy Harte
21
Alliteration in English-Language Versions of
Current Widespread European Idioms and Proverbs
Fionnuala Carson Williams
34
Alliteration in Inaugural Addresses: From George
Washington to Barack Obama
Helena Halmari
45
Purposely to Please the Palates of Pretty
Prattling Playfellows
Paul Cowdell
62
5
Dealing Dooms: Alliteration in the Old Frisian Laws
Rolf H. Bremmer Jr
6
Restrictions on Alliteration and Rhyme in
Contemporary Swedish Personal Names with an
Old Germanic Retrospect
Lennart Hagåsen
7
8
9
1
74
93
Alliteration in the Þrymskviða and in Chamisso’s German
Translation
Larissa Naiditch
109
Alliteration in Iceland: From the Edda to Modern
Verse and Pop Lyrics
Kristján Árnason
123
Alliteration Involving /s/ in the History of Icelandic Poetry
Ragnar Ingi Aðalsteinsson
vii
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141
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List of Tables
viii Contents
11 Around Analysis and Hypothesis of Hungarian
Alliteration
Vilmos Voigt
156
180
12 Alliteration in (Balto-) Finnic Languages
Frog and Eila Stepanova
195
13 Alliteration in Somali Poetry
Martin Orwin
219
14 Alliteration in Sign Language Poetry
Michiko Kaneko
231
Index
247
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10 Alliteration in Mongol Poetry
György Kara
3.1
Alliteration per 1000 words
52
3.2
Comparison of first vs subsequent inaugural addresses
55
14.1 Sequence of signs from Wim Emmerik’s ‘Desert’
241
14.2 The sign sequence from Rita DeSarker’s ‘Rose’
242
14.3 Three signs from Penny Beschizza’s ‘Grass’
242
14.4 Signs from Nigel Howard’s ‘Deaf’
243
ix
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List of Illustrations
3.1
Summary of the corpus
49
3.2
The ten presidents with the least alliteration
per 1000 words
51
The ten presidents with the most alliteration
per 1000 words
53
The ten addresses with the most alliteration
per 1000 words
54
The ten presidents with near-average alliteration
scores in chronological order
57
3.3
3.4
3.5
9.1
Alliteration with ‘s’
146
9.2
Over-alliteration in first and second line, secondary
alliteration side by side and separately
152
14.1 Sound patterns and examples
14.2
Contrast of plain and bent handshapes in their semantic
categories
x
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233
240
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List of Tables
Ragnar Ingi Aðalsteinsson is both a published poet and a researcher
of metrics. He is currently an adjunct in Icelandic at the University of
Iceland, while also writing both poetry and textbooks, as well as professional journal articles, especially on metrics.
Kristján Árnason is Professor of Icelandic Linguistics at the University
of Iceland. He has done work on sociolinguistics, historical phonology
and metrics. Among his publications in the latter fields are Quantity in
Historical Phonology: Icelandic and Related Cases (1980, reprinted 2009),
and The Rhythms of dróttkvætt and Other Old Icelandic Metres (1991,
reprinted 2000).
Rolf H. Bremmer Jr is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English and, by
special appointment, Professor of Frisian at the University of Leiden,
The Netherlands. He has published widely in both fields, most recently
An Introduction to Old Frisian. History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary (2009)
and, as co-editor with Kees Dekker, Practice in Learning: the Transfer of
Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages (2010).
Paul Cowdell was a professional actor before entering the academic world. A member of the Folklore Society, he won the Society’s
President’s Prize for an essay on an unpublished agricultural protest
song. He is currently researching contemporary belief in ghosts at the
University of Hertfordshire, UK. He has published articles on cannibal
ballads, occupational ghost stories, and folklore about rats.
Frog is presently a Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki
Department of Folklore Studies, Finland. His research focuses on the
transmission and evolution of Finno-Karelian and Germanic mythological narratives and poetics within the broader context of the circumBaltic cultural area.
Lennart Hagåsen works at the Department of Onomastics (Namnarkivet
i Uppsala) of the Institute for Language and Folklore (Institutet för språk
och folkminnen) in Uppsala, Sweden. His specialities are the study of
the morphophonology of Swedish personal names (first names and
surnames) and interpretations of Swedish place-names. He has also
published some articles on Slavonic word formation.
xi
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Notes on the Contributors
xii Notes on the Contributors
Jeremy Harte is a researcher into the overlap between folklore and the
landscape, especially places of encounter with the supernatural. His
books include Cuckoo Pounds and Singing Barrows, The Green Man, English
Holy Wells and Explore Fairy Traditions. He trained as a museum professional, and is curator of the Bourne Hall Museum, UK.
György Kara, long-time Professor of Inner Asian studies at ELTE
University of Budapest, currently Professor at Indiana University,
Bloomington, USA and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
has published on Altaic and Tibetan philology, including Chants
d’un barde mongol (1972), Books of the Mongolian Nomads (2005) and
Dictionary of Sonom Gara’s Erdeni-yin Sang (2009).
Michiko Kaneko works at the Graduate School of Education at the
University of Bristol, UK, where she is pursuing research into the linguistic
aspects of sign language poetry and metaphor and symbolism in the
language of visual-manual modality.
Larissa Naiditch is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of
Linguistics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where she
teaches Gothic, Old Icelandic, Old and Middle High German, as well as
several topics in general linguistics. Her fields of scientific interest include
the history and dialectology of German, comparative grammar and phonology of Germanic languages, languages in contact, and poetics.
Martin Orwin is Senior Lecturer in Somali and Amharic at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. He teaches
both languages and his research centres on language use in Somali
poetry, particularly the metrical system.
Jonathan Roper works at the Department of Estonian and Comparative
Folklore at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He is interested in traditional linguistic genres.
Eila Stepanova is based at the University of Helsinki’s Department of
Folklore Studies, Finland, where she is presently working on the language, structure and compositional strategies of Karelian laments in
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Helena Halmari is a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of
English at Sam Houston State University, USA. She has published in
the areas of bilingual code switching and discourse analysis. She is the
author of Government and Codeswitching: Explaining American Finnish
(1997) and co-editor (with Tuija Virtanen) of Persuasion across Genres: a
Linguistic Approach (2005).
Notes on the Contributors xiii
the contexts of local, regional, Finnic, Russian and Baltic cultures. She
is a board member of the Juminkeko Cultural Foundation and other
organisations.
Fionnuala Carson Williams is a folklorist specialising in proverbs, who
has contributed to projects and meetings such as the Association of
International Paremiology’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs.
Her book Wellerisms in Ireland was published in 2002.
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Vilmos Voigt is Professor of Folklore, Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty
of Philosophy, Budapest, Hungary. He graduated from the same university. His main interests are comparative folklore, comparative religion,
aesthetics and semiotics.
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Introduction: Key Topics in the
Study of Alliteration
In a sense the international study of alliteration is only now beginning.
The phenomenon of the repetition of word-initial sounds (to give a
simple definition of alliteration) is a widespread one, found in a significant variety of languages and text-types, but rarely has it been itself the
focus of study. It is a topic which has fallen out of fashion without ever
having been very fashionable. If we look at the monumental dictionary
of Old Germanic culture and language put together a century ago by
Hoops, we find ten pages dedicated to ‘Stabreim’ (1911–19: 4, 231–40).
But when we turn to the recently completed revision of this dictionary,
a work which has grown to 35 volumes from the original four, we find
alliteration receives half as many pages of coverage in a work which is
itself many times larger (Hoops 1973–2008: 29, 435–40).
To date, most discussion of alliteration has been made in passing, and
scholars who take alliteration as central to their studies, such as Jeep
(1995, 2006), or who take it as key data with which to view some other
phenomena, such as Minkova (2003), remain few in number. Much of
the scholarship that does exist on alliteration is on alliterative verse.
The ‘renascence of interest in alliterative meters’ that Gade and Fulk
(2000: i) spoke of shows no signs of lessening, and yet, even here, we
find another sign of the relative neglect of alliteration, in that the terminology that is used to discuss it is in no way as developed as that which
has developed over the centuries to discuss rhyme. True, scholars in particular research traditions have developed intriguing concepts, such as
‘alliterative haze’ (Sarv 1999, used in an Estonian context), ‘alliterative
rank’ (Brink 1920, Cronan 1986, used in a medieval English context),
‘colliteration’ (Burke 1941: 370), ‘cluster alliteration’ (e.g. in Minkova
2003), the distinction between ‘strong alliteration’ and ‘weak alliteration’ (used in a Baltic Finnic context), and the distinction between
1
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Jonathan Roper
Alliteration in Culture
‘alliterating’ and ‘staving’ (Jeep 1996: 34). However, these terms, which
might very well be applicable within other research traditions, have
remained somewhat buried in their original contexts, and have not yet
gained a wider circulation among international scholars.
So, the purpose of the present volume is to turn the focus onto alliteration. But alliteration cannot be studied in isolation. Alliteration occurs not
in the abstract but in culture: in specific text-types in specific languages at
specific times. The rules and conventions associated with alliteration vary
accordingly, as do its connotations. This volume thus presents a broad
range of specific examples of the use of alliteration in a variety of languages and text-types. Drawing on these chapters, we can begin to make
some initial generalisations as to alliteration’s powers and properties.
The book can be seen as falling into three sections: Chapters 1–4 cover
alliteration in various English text-types, Chapters 5–9 deal with alliteration in other Germanic languages and Chapters 10–14 address alliteration in other languages. To deal with the first of these sections first, we
can note that discussion of alliteration in English has been, aside from
pioneering contributions such as Schwarz (1923) and Dury (1996), largely
confined to the field of verse. Such work on alliterative metre includes
landmarks such as Skeat (1868), Oakden (1930, 1935), Lehmann (1956),
Turville-Petre (1977) and Minkova (2003), joined most recently by Putter
et al. (2007) and Putter and Jefferson (2009). Yet, while alliteration’s
role in English poetic metre ended half a millennium ago (see though
Turville-Petre (1977: 125) and Phelpstead (2004)), alliteration is still alive
and well in English prose: in proverbial comparisons, tabloid headlines
and the names of characters in children’s literature, to give just three
examples. The genres (or perhaps we should say ‘micro-genres’, in the
case of character names) in which alliteration plays a part are close to
speech and often considered ‘low’ stylistically, but are no less important
for that. The four chapters that deal with anglophone alliteration in this
collection are similarly dedicated to speech genres (or speech-like genres):
inaugural addresses, tongue-twisters, field-names and proverbs.
The collection is opened by Jeremy Harte’s discussion of alliteration
in English place-names. As befits a collection with the title Alliteration in
Culture, as well as identifying alliterations within his set of names, he also
identifies some cultural aspects of alliterative usages. Alliterative fieldnames in particular, but also alliterative names of streets and buildings,
generally are, he claims, scurrilous or deprecatory. While this type of assertion is open to abuse (during my marking days I remember often encountering over-imaginative explanations as to what ‘the effects of alliteration’
were), Harte here succeeds in giving convincing examples, and avoids the
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2
danger of going too far: ‘Long Lane is hardly evidence for a native tendency to alliterative coinages; what else could you call a lane that wasn’t
short?’ He also provides an alternate (or complementary?) hypothesis for
the use of alliteration in his material, suggesting that the use of alliteration may traditionally be a rhetorical indication of name-ness for entities
as diverse as flowers, pubs and spirits. Harte also observes that ‘dell’ and
‘parlour’ rarely occur as place-name generics outside of alliterative names.
This observation reminds us of the presence of certain words in Old and
Middle English alliterative poetry which are rarely found in prose or in
rhymed verse (on this see e.g. Brink 1920 and Turville-Petre 1977: 69–92).
No doubt these words may have had a ‘poetic’ character to them, but
there is also little doubt that their presence is also often alliterativa causa.
Carson Williams, whose background is in the study of proverbs and
wellerisms, addresses the presence of alliteration in current anglophone
proverbs and idioms. Her choice of using the EUROPHRAS (the European
Society for Phraseology) list of common European proverbs and idioms in
determining her corpus is a shrewd one in that, though it provides her
with a rather limited amount of material (less than 200 items in total), it
permits the comparison of the anglophone data with their francophone
and germanophone equivalents. Using an implicitly broad definition of
alliteration, she finds that it is more than twice as common in anglophone
proverbs as it is in anglophone idioms (approximately 30 and 13 per cent
respectively), figures which, perhaps surprisingly, parallel the figures for
the francophone material, but which are lower than in the germanophone material (especially the germanophone proverbs, 40 per cent of
which she discerns as alliterative). Alliteration has long been recognised as
characteristic of many fixed phrases – John Ray compiled a list of alliterative proverbial comparisons in English (‘Proverbial Similies, in which the
quality and the subject begin with the same letter’) nearly three and a half
centuries ago (Ray 1670: 201–3) – and this is surely a topic that demands
continued investigation. Carson Williams’ work also alerts us to the possible interactions of alliteration and word class (she points specifically the
role of idiom-final nouns) that should also figure in future research.
We next come to Helena Halmari’s consideration of alliteration in
the inaugural addresses of American presidents. Hers is an interesting,
yet happily well-bounded, corpus of material. She explicitly sets forth
the forms of alliteration she will consider, rejecting, for example, eye
alliteration (i.e. purely visual recurrence as in ‘cat’ and ‘ciao’), figuræ
etymologicæ, merely grammatical words (e.g. ‘of’, ‘by’, ‘the’, etc., as
opposed to content words such as ‘government’ and ‘people’). She also
rejects alliterations that fall across sentence boundaries. Having set out
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Jonathan Roper 3
Alliteration in Culture
her criteria, she calculates the rate of occurrence per thousand words
for each of the presidents, and is thus able to classify certain of them as
heavy, moderate or average alliterators (the last category being the one
in which Barack Obama, somewhat surprisingly, appears). From this
solid statistical basis, Halmari goes on to make intriguing observations
on stylistic aspects of alliteration and its strategic usage, touching on,
among other things, the question of populism. Halmari’s approach is
statistically sophisticated, and she rightly observes that her choice of
criteria is key to her findings: ‘changing even one of these seven criteria
may lead to differences in the results reported on here’.
Paul Cowdell addresses the hyper-alliterative genre of tongue-twisters.
Following an introduction which covers the genre in other languages,
he turns to focus on English examples. As befits both a former professional actor and a contemporary folklorist, he discusses tongue-twisters
as a continuing ‘part of the occupational practice of performers’, but
does not neglect their use by others, such as speech therapists, and
policemen testing sobriety. Cowdell’s awareness of the social aspects
of this form, including the latent double entendres of certain tonguetwisters, provides an example of one of the uses of alliteration in culture, and his discussion of the invocation and avoidance of obscenity in
tongue-twisters brings to mind the often alliterative relations between
taboo words and their noa counterparts, e.g. ‘God’ and its replacements
‘gosh’, ‘golly’, ‘goodness’, ‘Gordon Bennett’.
Alliteration is a linguistic phenomenon found not just in English but in
all the Germanic languages, since at least the fifth century, to judge by the
Gallehus inscription. Indeed, given the developments in the English stress
system, it may be a phenomenon more common in the other members of
the group. The next five chapters tackle alliteration in the Germanic languages, specifically in Frisian, Swedish, Icelandic and German. Dury in his
review of alliteration studies nominates Jacob Grimm as the figure with
whom ‘we may start a history of modern studies of alliteration’ (1996: 21).
Writing nearly two centuries ago, he (1815) drew attention to the presence
of alliteration in early Germanic law codes. Since Grimm drew especially
on Frisian data in making the claims he did, it is only appropriate that
we have a chapter dealing specifically with alliteration in the Old Frisian
legal texts. Bremmer addresses critically the scholarship on the laws from
Grimm on, including the important work of Buma and Szadrowsky, and
the more sceptical findings of Baum (1986), before going on to note that
far from this being a practice with purely Germanic roots, the influence
of Latin rhetorical training and the example of canonical authors such
as Cicero and Augustine (and above all, of the Vulgate Bible) is likely to
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4
have been just as significant. In this, the drift of his work is close to that
of Norman Blake, who emphasised the role of the rhetoric training associated with the artes prædicandi and ‘the new approaches to dialectic’ (Blake
1992: 514–15) as distinguishing the prose style of contemporaneous early
Middle English writers from their Old English predecessors. After such
observations, Bremmer then goes onto provide three illuminating close
readings, including an intriguing case of two parallel but independent
Frisian translations from Latin, only one of which alliterates in its target
language.
Hagåsen’s chapter is unique in this collection in that he focuses on
the intriguing phenomenon of the avoidance of alliteration. His data
sets are the 3000 commonest Swedish surnames, and a selection of male
and female first names. In both cases, his focus is on names with two
elements such as ‘Klintberg’ (a ‘dithematic surname’) or ‘Sven-Göran’
(a ‘double first name’). His rigorous, statistically informed analysis
suggests name-givers avoid using alliteration (and also rhyme) for stylistic reasons: the ‘playfulness and verve’ of alliteration may make too
‘conspicuous and even ridiculous’ an impression. Comparing this and
the previous chapter shows some of the profoundly different stylistic
connotations alliteration has in different text-types and cultures: while
Bremmer shows that opting for alliteration in Frisian legal texts can
endow a text with the feel of the archaic, Hagåsen shows the avoidance
of alliteration in Swedish name-giving is also a stylistic choice, this
time to avoid giving the impression of the ridiculous. But Hagåsen also
shows us that the general tendency to avoid alliteration can be affected
by historical factors. Prestige trumps the sense of ridiculous in the cases
of the noble associations evoked by the old Swedish name, Sten-Sture,
or the ready-made borrowing from German, Lise-Lott.
Larissa Naiditch in her contribution focuses on the problems facing
a translator of alliterative verse, taking up the case of the Old Icelandic
poem Þrymskviða and its translation into German more than half a millennium later by Adalbert Chamisso. As she points out, unlike many
modern translators, whose use of alliteration is generally spray-on
rather than structural, Chamisso aimed at preserving the alliterations
of his original. This is not the path taken by every translator of alliterative verse: versions displaying Rebsamen’s (2004) tenacious attempts ‘to
adhere strictly to the rules of alliteration’ are rare. We might compare
Rebsamen with Rein Sepp, who, as well as attempting to preserve alliterations in his Estonian translation of Beowulf (1990), also attempts to
preserve the midline pauses too. Here, the translation of alliterative
verse led to the introduction of a new verse measure into Sepp’s target
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Jonathan Roper 5
Alliteration in Culture
language due to his decision to eschew the simpler option of using the
existing Estonian alliterative trochaic tetrameter and to faithfully use a
longer line with a cæsura. Naiditch’s translator is also a suitably dogged
one, and she shows how he succeeded in maintaining the complex
fornyrðislag rules in his German version. Indeed, given the unfamiliarity
of his contemporary audience with alliterative verse, he uses a maximal
amount of alliteration: a paradoxical exaggeration of the original to
render it truly in its target language.
Naiditch’s contribution leads us into two Icelandic chapters, which
conclude the section of the book dealing with Germanic alliteration.
The reason for the special treatment given to Icelandic in this volume is
that, as both of our Icelandic authors point out, in contrast to the situation in the other Germanic languages, alliterative poetry has survived in
Icelandic till the present. In the first of these chapters, Árnason provides
us with an overview of Icelandic verse practice from skaldic times to
the present day, in which we can see that, despite language change and
metrical innovation, alliteration has maintained its role. Just as there
is a view current in much of the anglosphere that a text is not really
poetry unless it rhymes, we are led to conclude that in Iceland a text is
not really viewed as poetry unless it alliterates. Even in Icelandic free
verse, alliteration remains a key feature. It is only to be expected that
the views of poets and critics as to the correct role of alliteration are
key, and Árnason guides us through their sometimes conflicting views,
reminding us of the common ground in this discussion, namely that
all agree that alliteration is integral to poetic form. He also discusses a
remarkable example of the pull to alliterate: alliterative Icelandic versions of Elvis Presley lyrics.
The second of these chapters, that of Aðalsteinsson, provides further
evidence of the extraordinary resilience of alliteration in Icelandic
poetry. The discussion here is more tightly focused, though dealing with
a substantial corpus of 7325 line pairs. Aðalsteinsson is investigating
the varying treatment of one particular sound (and its combinations)
in Icelandic alliterative verse over the centuries. One of the aims of this
book has been to expand the vocabulary available to us for discussing
alliteration, and in his close study, Aðalsteinsson uses a series of technical terms, including equivalence class, gnystuduls, s-alliteration, epenthetic alliteration, over-alliteration and secondary alliteration, which
may well prove useful to students of other alliterative traditions.
In the final third of the book, we turn to alliterative practices outside
the Germanic language group: in eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, as well
as alliteration (or an analogue of it) in a non-Germanic language current
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6
in Britain. The first of these chapters is by György Kara, and focuses
upon Mongol verse traditions. Alliteration is predominant in such traditions from the earliest (thirteenth century) document till today and
throughout the full gamut of poetic genres, including translations into
Mongolian. Kara guides us through the various forms, both line-internal
and line-external, that alliteration can take and the interaction of alliteration with other forms of sound patterning in his valuable exposition
of this little-known tradition. He also turns at the conclusion of the
chapter to the question of potential Mongol influence behind the presence of alliteration in Manchu and Turkic poetry.
This same question of the interrelations of alliterative versification
among Mongols, Turks, Uighurs and Uzbeks is also touched upon in the
following chapter by Vilmos Voigt. His chief focus, however, is alliteration in Hungarian. For Voigt, Hungarian alliteration is eye alliteration:
‘alliteration and not assonance: it uses letters and not sounds’. Though
there are early examples of alliteration in Hungarian texts, Voigt sees
it as a late, literary development rather than an ancient Finno-Ugric
inheritance. Similarly to Bremmer, Voigt draws on the importance of
pan-European Latin rhetorical models in his account.
Another form of Finno-Ugric alliteration, that of the Finnic languages
found on the eastern shores of the Baltic, such as Finnish, Karelian and
Estonian, is discussed in the following chapter by Frog and Stepanova.
Alliteration in such languages has been the topic of an important (and
multilingual) scholarly tradition, which includes work by Sadeniemi
(1951), Laugaste (1970) and Leino (1986). The authors have mastered
both the primary data and the multilingual research traditions, and
bring these to us in a concise and logical form.
The presence of initial syllable stress in the (Baltic-) Finnic languages
could be taken to suggest the use of alliteration in the verse traditions of
these languages dates back a long way. But in the absence of early surviving manuscripts, and given that the data they draw on mostly date from
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the authors wisely draw back
from any such assertions. There may have been some interaction with
neighbouring Germanic traditions, but the Germanic and Finno-Ugric
alliterative traditions may just as well have developed independently
due to their shared prosodic feature of initial syllable stress (Roper 2009:
91). The question is one vexed by a lack of evidence, and is underlain
by the even more interesting (and unanswerable?) question of why the
Germanic and Finno-Ugric languages share this typologically unusual
feature of initial syllable stress, i.e. is Germanic initial stress a result of
Finno-Ugric influence? Or indeed is the presence of initial stress in both
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Jonathan Roper 7
Alliteration in Culture
Germanic and Finno-Ugric the result of influence from a third, now
lost, language group?
While many may have some sense of Finnish and Karelian alliterative
verse, not least from its representation in The Kalevala, the authors usefully cover lesser known traditions from this part of the world, such as
Ingrian and Seto verse in their chapter, as well as the somewhat different
performance traditions of yoik and lament. Martin Orwin provides us
with an overview of yet another little known alliterative tradition in his
contribution. In contrast to the language groups we have been discussing,
Somali has no initial syllable stress (indeed, it is a pitch-accent language
without stress), so the presence of alliteration in its metrical system is
something of a surprise to outsiders. As he describes the situation, we
can observe that alliteration in Somali can be a line-internal device, as
in the Germanic and Baltic-Finnic languages, but also a line-external
phenomenon, as in some of the Turkic languages (Gasparov 1996: 38).
His well-exemplified discussion concludes with a look at three particular
poems in which ‘alliteration is used creatively in different ways’.
The most daring of the chapters is the last one, authored by Michiko
Kaneko. She attempts to extend the concept of alliteration outside the
sphere of spoken language. One homology between spoken and signed
language was mentioned early in the book by Cowdell, who brought
our attention to the ‘finger fumbler’ as a sign language equivalent of
the ‘tongue-twister’: a block of sign language difficult to articulate due
its repeated or alternating movements. But Kaneko is going further
than this here. And yet, perhaps hers is not such an outlandish move
when we recall that we already use the term ‘eye alliteration’ to refer to
a phenomenon denoting a visual and non-audible recurrence. Sceptics
will respond that the potential parallel is less convincing when we recall
that such eye alliteration is often identified precisely in order for it to be
dismissed in contrast to ‘real’ alliteration. So, while there are certainly
recurring formal elements in sign language, especially when used artistically, the key question here is, is there any equivalent of the initial
sound in sign language? Kaneko says there is – handshape. Kaneko’s
contribution is also daring in her discussion of sound symbolism and
the motivation for the choice of alliterating sounds. While sound patterning does have an effect on its hearers, it is difficult to say exactly
what that effect is, or how that could be separated from other linguistic
features. Even those who do not accept Kaneko’s proposed analogy
may well learn much about alliteration conceptually by comparing it
to recurrent initial features in quite other artistic and communicative
systems.
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Jonathan Roper 9
In one sense the thread that links all these contributions is topical: they
treat alliteration and its uses in a variety of cultures, encompassing verse
and prose, speech and writing, its avoidance and its retention, how it
can structure verse, and how it can strengthen attempts at persuasion.
But looking beyond the topical, we find that these chapters, while
diverse in subject matter and approach, possess three main areas of
commonality: the interaction of alliteration and phonology, alliteration
and stylistics, and alliteration and semantics.
Phonology
To begin with the first of these areas, we can note that behind the brief
definition of alliteration I began with there lie a whole series of complications arising from what is considered as the same sound. This is
more than the question of how different languages divide up possible
sounds into phonemes, though this is clearly part of it too. The least
questionable instances of alliteration occur between examples of the
same single consonantal phoneme. But what about cases where there
is a cluster of consonants at the beginning of a word? And what about
cases where there is no initial consonant at all? These circumstances are
the ones that alliterative traditions deal with in different ways, and as
Aðalsteinsson reminds us the same tradition can vary in its treatment
of such circumstances over the course of history.
Another question is, can visual conventions overpower our auditory
perceptions? Are alliterations which are visually disguised, e.g. that
between ‘crown’ and ‘king’, less likely to be used in a highly literate age?
Conversely, has the visual fact that both ‘sea’ and ‘shell’ begin with the
letter <s> obscured the auditory distinction between the phonemes /s/
and /ʃ/ ? While these phonemes do not alliterate in Old English verse,
the conventions had changed by the Middle English period when there
are examples of these sounds linked in alliterative verse. But this linking
is not confined to English: Frog and Stepanova give a Karelian example
in which /s/ and /ʃ/ are considered to alliterate in Chapter 12.
In Old Germanic verse, alliteration of consonant clusters beginning
with /s-/ were subject to special rules. For example, in Old English alliterative verse, words beginning /sp-/ can only alliterate with words beginning with /sp-/. Words beginning /st-/ or /sk-/ are similarly restricted.
While this rule applies to s + voiceless stop, it does not apply, or does
not apply so stringently, to other clusters beginning with /s-/ such as /sl-/
or /sw-/, or for clusters without s, such as /tr-/, /kw-/ or /fl-/, etc. These
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Key topics
Alliteration in Culture
conventions largely disappeared in the course of time, and thus we see
that Hagåsen does not try to follow them by, for example, denying alliterativity to the elements of the surname ‘Sundström’. He accepts that /s/
alliterates with the cluster /st/, although he does take pains to label such
phenomena (with a nod to ‘imperfect rhyme’) ‘imperfect alliteration’.
But in Icelandic, the rules governing s-alliteration have tightened
over time as Aðalsteinsson reminds us in his contribution, and a larger
number of conventions face the poet. These two paths of development
serve to show that consonantal clusters, especially clusters beginning
with /s-/, are typically an area of complexity in alliterative systems. As
Harbert (2007: 69) notes, the complexity associated with alliteration
involving s-clusters may arise as /s/ can be considered extra-syllabic, i.e.
outside the syllable, and thus not subject to the generally applicable
constraints regarding sonority. He also notes the not insignificant fact
that in Germanic languages /s/ (or, in some cases /ʃ/) is the only sound
that can begin a tri-consonantal cluster. Other attempts to unpack these
rules can be found in Suzuki (1996) and Minkova (2003), while discussions focused on specific instances of cluster alliteration can be found
in Griffith (1997: 27–9, 2005: 149, 165–6) and Bredehoft (2005: 65–6).
One of the earliest usages of the term ‘cluster alliteration’ seems to be
that by Krishna (1983: xviii, xxv).
Another area where traditions can diverge is in their treatment of
zero onset. In Germanic practice any initial vowel can alliterate with
any other initial vowel, but in Balto-Finnic practice a vowel typically
alliterates only with itself. (Even the exceptions in Balto-Finnic practice
tend to confirm the rule, in that in cases where the front vowel /e/ is
not linked with /e/ (or /ei/), it is far more likely to link with fellow front
vowels /i/ or /ø/ than with back vowels (Sarv 2000: 73).) The interaction of steady-state vowels and diphthongs is another complicating
issue that touches once more on the question of how close a phonetic
similarity is required between sounds, and which conventional matches
apply in a particular tradition. There is some treatment of how one set
of traditions deals with diphthongs in Chapter 12.
Many have felt the need to explain the promiscuous nature of
Germanic vowel alliteration. Some, such as Classen (1913), invoked a
past period when each vowel alliterated only with itself, a practice now
partially disguised by sound change. Others have invoked now lost
initial sounds such as glottal stops (most recently Minkova 2003) or
‘lax glides’ (Jacobson 1963) to argue that onset alliteration was once the
rule. (The initial glottal stops are paralleled by Somali alliterative uses
as illustrated in Chapter 13.) But are any such explanations necessary?
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10
Comparative evidence shows that it is perfectly possible for alliterative
systems to have holes. Take for example the Finnic system: although,
as Abondolo (2001: 88) remarks, a ‘certain amount of alliteration in
Finnish is difficult to avoid’ (like rhyme in Italian), it is still conventional for a significant minority of lines within longer Finnic alliterative
poems to have no alliteration (Leino 1986: 134).
Yet another area of tension arises when more than one set of onset
correspondences are found in a single unit of verse (various examples
of this go by the names of ‘cross’, ‘secondary’, ‘incidental’ and ‘double’
alliteration among English medievalists). Whether this is a virtue or
a fault depends not just on large-scale cultural variables, but in some
cases on the tendencies of the poet and the taste of the audience (some
consideration of this is given in Aðalsteinsson’s chapter).
And then there is the whole matter of phonological stress. Although
there are century-old studies on alliteration in languages such as
French (Riese 1888) or Italian (Taylor 1900), etc., alliteration as a phenomenon involving initial sounds is especially salient in languages
where the first syllable of a word is usually stressed. Thus it is that alliteration plays a role in the native metres of languages in the Germanic,
Finno-Ugric and Mongolian groups, all dealt with in the chapters that
follow. We can also note that Ray, in picking out ‘the quality’ and ‘the
subject’ amongst the possible choice of words in his proverbial comparisons (1670: 201–3), is focusing on content words (such as busie or
bee), rather than grammatical words (such as of, the or as), and thus
has implicitly recognised the significance of the interaction between
alliteration and stress. But despite the close association of alliteration
with stress in many systems, alliteration, as Orwin discusses in this
volume, is also prevalent in Somali tradition, even though Somali is
not a language in which the concept of stress plays a phonological
role. Furthermore, Somali alliteration is not just line-internal as that in
some Turkic languages, but often line-internal as in the initial stressed
languages. The motivation for Somali alliteration is thus something of
a mystery.
What happens in stressed languages when stress and primacy do not
co-occur in the same syllable? Words in Germanic do not always have
initial stress – they may be loans, or they may have prefixes. In times,
places and text-types where the heard is more vigorous than the read,
stress will trump spelling. In Old Frisian, ‘bihut’ and ‘biheleth’ were
considered to alliterate, but, as Bremmer points out here, not on the /b/
of the unstressed prefix, but on the /h/ of the stressed root. However,
as I have not tried to harmonise the contributors’ terminology (they
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Jonathan Roper 11
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