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Comment by pothibo | Hacker News Reader

How is french easier to rhyme than english? Do you have empirical evidence?

Since I'm a french canadian who is lucky enough to speak the two languages, I find it difficult to believe.

Remember that rap (rhyme and poetry) was popularized by poor english speaking people.

For a discussion of the ease of rhyming in French versus English, see, e.g., this book [0]. Rhymes are widely considered to be easier to form in French; partly as a result, however, classical French poetry developed several additional stylistic constraints related to rhyming, such as the distinction between "feminine" and "masculine" rhymes of words with and without a final devoiced "e".

I wonder what you would accept as "empirical evidence" of the relative ease of rhyming in different languages. The demand strikes me as typifying one of the obnoxious impulses of the Hacker News community (another of them on display elsewhere in this thread) to dress up a vapid criticism as scientific skepticism.

You could, I suppose, try to do a combinatorial analysis of the ease of rhyming by writing a program to find rhyming pairs in a phonetic dictionary; just make sure your blog post about the results properly acknowledges the shortcomings of your analysis in its title.

0. https://books.google.com/books?id=ByVoAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA60&ots=...

So basically you make a claim that french is easier to rhyme than english, then I ask you if you have any evidence and you retorqued with a condescending answer adding a link to a book you took 5 second to google and that you didn't read.

You didn't read it because I just read it and while the first sentence would make it appear to back your point, it doesn't. First because he doesn't compare french to english but merely explain how the main accent is put on the suffix of words and that, in turn, makes it easy in french to build rhyme.

And if you continue to the next page, he explains how french rhyme are not on the same level as their english counterpart "because most English rhymes involve the root rather than the inflectional ending or suffix [...]"

Bottom line, you are wrong, and you try to pass as knowledgeable. You are a fraud.

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