Metre (poetry) words made no difference to the metre. A number of other ancient languages also used quantitative metre, such as Sanskrit and Classical Arabic (but not Biblical Hebrew). Finally, non-stressed languages that have little or no differentiation of syllable length, such as French or Chinese, base their verses on the number of syllables only. The most common form in French is the Alexandrine, with twelve syllables a verse, and in classical Chinese five characters, and thus five syllables. But since each Chinese character is pronounced using one syllable in a certain tone, classical Chinese poetry also had more strictly defined rules,
Alexandrine or nonstress on certain syllables) and options (such as a permitted or required additional syllable at the end of one or both hemistichs). Thus a line that is metrical in one tradition may be unmetrical in another. The term "alexandrine" may be used with greater or lesser rigor. Peureux suggests that only French syllabic verse with a 6+6 structure is, strictly speaking, an alexandrine. Preminger "et al". allow a broader scope: "Strictly speaking, the term 'alexandrine' is appropriate to French syllabic meters, and it may be applied to other metrical systems only where they too espouse syllabism as their principle,