About two days leftThere's still insults to be madeQuick! Pick your target!
Not into HaikuStifles CreativityYet tempted to try - still.
Haiku Wars is mine.As Arsidubu once said:"You all suck.". So there.
If I could write youA haiku or two,I would.But alas, I can't.
Oh, dear Fanatic,Forget it! Those sad choppersCan't write down a word...
Hey I'm a chopper,Whose words have yet to fail himFX not so much...
+ in reply to...
Arsi once said that?I thought that he said it inperpetuity.
Maybe Arsi's quoteAlternates in direction."You all blow.", perhaps.
TinStar, FanaticDeny Mister_IQ anear multifecta.
I was so darned close.I'll get you next time, pretty.And your little dog.
Good job, IQ, but"Shiresartservice" still hasFive syllables. D'oh.
Does the art serviceNot, like a bunch of hobbits,Belong to the shire?
See, we should actually ask her, because I thought that "Shires" rhymes with "hires" and "ires" and "expires" and would therefore have 1 syllable. Shires|art|ser|vice.Perhaps it's an accent/nationality thing?Shiresartservice, how do YOU pronounce your name?
Contest is overNothing more to see here, eh?Everyone go home
Mister_IQ saidbecause I thought that "Shires" rhymes with "hires" and "ires" and "expires"
I absolutely agre. All of those have actually two syllables. :p (Except expires, which has three).Syllable Counter
That's very interesting.However, that site seems to simply count vowel/consonant groupings. You can add made up words and get a syllable count. So, even though the word "ires", when broken up visually, looks like it should have "I" and "RES" as syllables, it's not pronounced that way here.I'm really interested in this, because I can't see any way to pronounce that that would have two syllables. I love accents and different ways of using english, and I don't think I've ever noticed anyone that would say "ires" as two syllables. Do you really say it "eye-rez"?"I hope she high-rez me.""The ticket ex-pie-rez tomorrow."Really? That's very cool. Where are you from? Do you know another language? Did you learn it before english, or is english your native tongue? (Sorry, I don't know much about you, Min)
I find it interesting, too (I'm a language fetishist, that's why I brought this up, not because I am a wise-guy. OK, I am a wise-guy, too).No, English is not my native tongue, I'm from Germany. I lived some years abroad, though (Canada, btw), but I still pronounce some thing British or Irish (my school teacher was British, my university teacher was Irish).Anyways.I do not say "eye-rez". I would say "eye-errz". But if I do the old clapping routine (you know, the one which kids do in school to learn syllable count, I would clap twice (for ires, hires, shires) and thrice (for expires: ex-pie-errz).I called two native speaking friends. One said two, the other one syllable. So it's a draw. (Btw, they're both Canadian).Perhaps we can make it a forum poll. :) I really want to know now. It MUST be written down somewhere.
I searched for a more reliable syllable counter, but most websites point to Wordcalc.The other one is this one, which seems to agree (hires 2, expires 3), but it probably works with the same system than Wordcalc?
Whereas Webster's seems to agree with you and give expire two syllables.
OH! I see. Eye-erz.I'm a total wikipedia goon on this one, but it would seem that "res" with a silent E can't be it's own syllable. A syllable seems to require a vowel sound and it's corresponding consonants. The "eye" sound also provides the beginning of the "yerz" sound, so it would seem to me to be a single syllable, technically.This is the awesome part of homeschooling: trying to teach your kids english and seeing how pretty much EVERYTHING is an exception or doesn't quite fit the rules or has it's own little custom rule. It's an art, not a science. There's very rarely only one exactly correct answer.Yay for vague, illogical language!
Beloved haiku form:Ill-suited to discussingSyllabic vaguenessSome words in spoken form have one or two syllables depending on the speaker. Beer, for instance. I tend to say beehhhhhhr, so it's one long syllable. Other people say bee-er or beya. I'd have backed Mister_IQ on his shiresartservice syllable count, because I hear shires as shyrz, but can imagine some people would hear it shy-ers. I guess the German pronunciation would be she-ress. But then I wasn't sure if it was something to do with high-resolution (hi-res), S high rez art service. That's MORE syllables again!In lyric sheets and poetry, when a word is made two syllables, there are marks to denote it, and when a multisyllable word becomes one, an apostrophe might be used to reclaim the extra vowels, but when the word's syllable count is dependent on pronunciation, what do you do? Write badly scanning poetry for half the world's English-speaking population and brilliant poetry for the other half - with the reader choosing which half is which?