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Nebu comments on Little Johny Bayesian - Less Wrong
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Comments (17)
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:
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
I foresee a comment-threading nightmare. We definitely need a wiki to collaborate on this.
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.)