Rests are variously indicated with fricative syllables, such as sa and ho; or with semivowels, such as iya. A polysyllable, such as sore and dokkoi, indicates a two-beat rest. This is called "kakegoe." If the rest is not sung, the space is often filled with unscripted sounds called kiais.
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Harry McLaughlin determined that word length and sentence length should be multiplied rather than added as in other formulas. In 1969, he published his SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) formula: :SMOG grading = 3 + . :Where: polysyllable count = number of words of more than two syllables in a sample of 30 sentences. The SMOG formula correlates 0.88 with comprehension as measured by reading tests.
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The Halle–Keyser system has been criticized because it can identify passages of prose as iambic pentameter.Attridge 1982, p 41. Later generative metrists pointed out that poets have often treated non-compound words of more than one syllable differently from monosyllables and compounds of monosyllables. Any normally weak syllable may be stressed as a variation if it is a monosyllable, but not if it is part of a polysyllable except at the beginning of a line or a phrase.
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Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of the World, p.87, citing J.T. Hooker et al., Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet, British Museum, 1993, Ch. 2 A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic; also bisyllable and bisyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.
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According to Williams, the continued writing of and in monosyllables is an archaism and a reflection of orthographic conservatism which does not represent the contemporary pronunciation of the scribes. According to Dunbar & George, the scribes who wrote were describing the quality of the vowel, whereas those who wrote were describing the reduced quantity of a half-long vowel in a polysyllable. Both of these interpretations are questioned by who argue that the use of and in the texts reflects the phonetic reality of the language at around the time the manuscripts were written. According to their analysis, the graph used by the scribes is determined by the quality of the vowel (rather than the quantity), and vocalic alternation is a consequence of the lowering of Old Cornish to .
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When the phthongos of δι (G) had turned from the tetartos to the tritos (δ'→γ'), it was combined with the dynamic tritos sign, that of phthora νανὰ. The four of the descending enechemata (πλ α', πλ β', υαρ, and πλ δ'), and the phthora nana (γ'). Thus, it was still possible to refer to the tetraphonia of the trochos system within the heptaphonia of Chrysanthos' parallage, but there was one exception: usually the νανὰ represented the tritos element, while the varys-sign (the ligature for υαρ) represented the ζω (b natural)—the plagios tritos which could no longer establish a pentachord to its kyrios (like in the old system represented by Western solfeggio between B fa and F ut'), because it had been diminished to a slightly augmented tritone. The older polysyllable parallage of the trochos was represented between the third and the sixth column.
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Any normally weak syllable may be stressed as a variation if it is a monosyllable, but not if it is part of a polysyllable except at the beginning of a line or a phrase. Thus Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 2: × × / / × / × /(×)× / For the four winds blow in from every coast but wrote "vanishingly few" lines of the form of "As gazelles leap a never- resting brook". The stress patterns are the same, and in particular, the normally weak third syllable is stressed in both lines; the difference is that in Shakespeare's line the stressed third syllable is a one-syllable word, "four", whereas in the un-Shakespearean line it is part of a two-syllable word, "gazelles". (The definitions and exceptions are more technical than stated here.) Pope followed such a rule strictly, Shakespeare fairly strictly,Kiparsky said there were no such lines in Shakespeare.
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