rime riche - Wordsmith.org

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Attention, all you poets out there: do you know what this (rime riche) is? I just came across it while looking up something else. I have to say, the pronunciation given bugs me; to me it looks like it ought to be reem reesh. It is apparently similar to identical rhyme, which I confess I thought at first was a redundancy. But I guess not:
The American Heritage� Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

identical rhyme

NOUN: 1. Repetition of the same word in the rhyme position. 2. See rime riche.

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The American Heritage� Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

rime riche

PRONUNCIATION: rm rsh
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. rimes riches ( rm rsh)
Rhyme using words or parts of words that are pronounced identically but have different meanings, for example, write-right or port-deport. Also called identical rhyme.
ETYMOLOGY: French : rime, rhyme + riche, rich.

Ok--what's the deal with pronunciation, here? I didn't actually read this one until I copied it (at the site, you can see that the e's have the long-e line over them; didn't copy, sorry), because I had just looked at another dictionary which gives rim rish as the pronunciation.

s'Frainch. Hence the reversed word order too.

edit: ignore that - hadn't read your question correctly! Time for sleep.

Time for sleep. I should think so, Sweet Thing. Lul-la-bye, and good-night...

Rhyme using words or parts of words that are pronounced identically but have different meanings Now, please tell me what other rhymes are there?

what other rhymes are there?

In rime riche one would rhyme all with awl but not all with ball. In ordinary rhyme all and ball could be used as rhymes. The point of rime riche is that you have more than just the final vowel and any following consonants involved in the rhyme, you would also require that any leading consonant clusters be identical.

Ain't it offal?

Ok, so back to the question...

The French version would be a promunciation close to 'rim rish', yes? And I guess by the time the phrase has been more absorbed into American usage, it would become colloquialised by more American prounciation, with a long /i/ sound. This is only an educated guess but we can observe a similar process with chaise longue. Where IS my OEDisk, dammit?!!

Looking into the waters of French poetry I found this amongst much other interesting stuff:

Rhymes containing only one element, the vowel, not preceded by the consonne d�appui are termed rimes faibles, and, properly speaking, are not rhymes but assonances. Any rhymes containing more than the two minimum elements are termed rimes riches (e.g. puni-muni). Lines can, of course, be richer, with two or more additional elements, as in plier-peuplier, ouvrier-chevrier, etc...

http://www.ex.ac.uk/french/ingrid/versification.htm

Hey, this is cool (from mav's link): It is the alexandrine (l�alexandrin) or twelve syllable line ( so- called from a 12th Century poem entitled Le roman d�Alexandre) If I ever knew this, I'd forgotten it.

Edit: in French, roman means a novel. So I don't think it could be related to romance languages, right? Or is it? If not, how did the French come to have this word meaning what it means?

Edit 2:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

in French, roman means a novel. So I don't think it could be related to romance languages, right?

Where's jheem when ya need him?

The Romance languages were those derived from the common people's language, also known as Vulgar Latin, rather than the classical, literary language. Works that were written in this people's language rather than classical Latin were termed Romances or Romans.

there is also the literary term roman � clef, (i think that is the right accent mark over the a) which is a thinly disguised novel (Colors by anonymous) comes to mind as an example, --anyone reading it, could easily see it was about bill clinton--but the names of all the key players had been changed to protect the guilty

Works that were written in this people's language rather than classical Latin were termed Romances or Romans. Ah! Merci.