Editing Metre (poetry) (section)

==={{anchor|Qualitative metre}}{{anchor|Quantitative metre}}Qualitative versus quantitative metre===
The metre of most poetry of the Western world and elsewhere is based on patterns of syllables of particular types. The familiar type of metre in English-language poetry is called '''qualitative metre''', with stressed syllables coming at regular intervals (e.g. in [[iambic pentameter]]s, usually every even-numbered syllable). Many [[Romance languages]] use a scheme that is somewhat similar but where the position of only one particular stressed syllable (e.g. the last) needs to be fixed. The [[Alliterative verse|alliterative metre]] of the old [[Germanic poetry]] of languages such as [[Old Norse]] and [[Old English]] was radically different, but was still based on stress patterns.

Some classical languages, in contrast, used a different scheme known as '''quantitative metre''', where patterns were based on [[syllable weight]] rather than stress. In the [[dactylic hexameter]]s of [[Classical Latin]] and [[Classical Greek]], for example, each of the six [[Foot (prosody)|feet]] making up the line was either a [[Dactyl (poetry)|dactyl]] (long-short-short) or a [[spondee]] (long-long): a "long syllable" was literally one that took longer to pronounce than a short syllable: specifically, a syllable consisting of a long vowel or diphthong or followed by two consonants. The stress pattern of the words made no difference to the metre. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as [[Sanskrit language|Sanskrit]], [[Persian language|Persian]], [[Old Church Slavonic]] and [[Classical Arabic]] (but not [[Biblical Hebrew]]).

Finally, non-stressed languages that have little or no differentiation of syllable length, such as French or Chinese, base their verses on the number of syllables only. The most common form in French is the {{lang|fr|[[Alexandrin]]}}, with twelve syllables a verse, and in classical Chinese five characters, and thus five syllables. But since each Chinese character is pronounced using one syllable in a certain [[Tone (linguistics)|tone]], [[classical Chinese poetry]] also had more strictly defined rules, such as thematic parallelism or tonal antithesis between lines.