Eliezer_Yudkowsky 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.
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.)