LIT-tle john-ny BAYE-si-an once THOUGHT he was real BRIGHT
BUT the o-ther KIDS would al-ways MOCK him day and NIGHT
HE could count and SING and read and SPELL and guess the WEA-ther
TILL one day big BILL told him bright BOYS could grow a FEA-ther
“ACH” he cried, his SPI-rits down, “could THIS be real-ly TRUE?”
“THAT would mean I MUST be dumb, and THAT would make me BLUE!”
HOME, he went, and RUBBED his scalp till IT had hurt all O-ver
THEN, at last, he FELT a growth, ’twas JUST like a small CLO-ver
“WOW” he cried with GLEE and said “it’s TRUE, I’ve got them SPROU-ting”
This is about as far as I could get before I ran out of time. The next line is “His intelligence now certain, he grew calm and stopped his pouting” but I can’t seem to get the accent to land on the first syllable. I’m stuck with “in-TEL-li-gence” and “wis-DOM now cer-tain” sounds more natural to me than “WIS-dom now cert-ain”. So someone else will have to take over from here.
In a lot of old poems, fire is just one syllable, and fiery two. I imagine real could be similarly condensed. In the most widely accepted english translation of the Kalevala (Finnish national epic), fire is never two syllables. I always found that strange because I pronounce it “fie-urr”.
I think one-syllable “fire” is more common in British English. (When I have access to a more convenient Web browser than my phone’s, if I remember to, I’ll dig up relevant posts from John C. Wells’s blog.)
See here about words like “fire”. IIRC he also considers “real” to be varisyllabic; and probably there are people out there who pronounce “Bayesian” with two syllables, to rhyme with (young people’s pronunciation of) “Asian”¹. (I can find many posts about compression and smoothing but none which summarizes it all.)
I read that some old people pronounce “Asian” to rhyme with “nation”.
This has a better meter, but it’s not quite fully consistent yet. I think the first line (with a few tiny modifications) has a good rhythm to it:
LIT-tle john-ny BAYE-si-an once THOUGHT he was real BRIGHT
ONE two three four ONE two three four ONE two three four ONE
The trick is then to get all the other lines to follow the same beat.
I’ll look into trying to get the whole thing converted to one beat, but I don’t promise anything.
LIT-tle john-ny BAYE-si-an once THOUGHT he was real BRIGHT
BUT the o-ther KIDS would al-ways MOCK him day and NIGHT
HE could count and SING and read and SPELL and guess the WEA-ther
TILL one day big BILL told him bright BOYS could grow a FEA-ther
“ACH” he cried, his SPI-rits down, “could THIS be real-ly TRUE?”
“THAT would mean I MUST be dumb, and THAT would make me BLUE!”
HOME, he went, and RUBBED his scalp till IT had hurt all O-ver
THEN, at last, he FELT a growth, ’twas JUST like a small CLO-ver
“WOW” he cried with GLEE and said “it’s TRUE, I’ve got them SPROU-ting”
This is about as far as I could get before I ran out of time. The next line is “His intelligence now certain, he grew calm and stopped his pouting” but I can’t seem to get the accent to land on the first syllable. I’m stuck with “in-TEL-li-gence” and “wis-DOM now cer-tain” sounds more natural to me than “WIS-dom now cert-ain”. So someone else will have to take over from here.
re-al = two syllables
THOUGHT that he was BRIGHT
In a lot of old poems, fire is just one syllable, and fiery two. I imagine real could be similarly condensed. In the most widely accepted english translation of the Kalevala (Finnish national epic), fire is never two syllables. I always found that strange because I pronounce it “fie-urr”.
I think one-syllable “fire” is more common in British English. (When I have access to a more convenient Web browser than my phone’s, if I remember to, I’ll dig up relevant posts from John C. Wells’s blog.)
See here about words like “fire”. IIRC he also considers “real” to be varisyllabic; and probably there are people out there who pronounce “Bayesian” with two syllables, to rhyme with (young people’s pronunciation of) “Asian”¹. (I can find many posts about compression and smoothing but none which summarizes it all.)
I read that some old people pronounce “Asian” to rhyme with “nation”.
I foresee a comment-threading nightmare. We definitely need a wiki to collaborate on this.