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,
Poetry a rhythm. Classical Chinese poetics, based on the tone system of Middle Chinese, recognized two kinds of tones: the level (平 "píng") tone and the oblique (仄 "zè") tones, a category consisting of the rising (上 "sháng") tone, the departing (去 "qù") tone and the entering (入 "rù") tone. Certain forms of poetry placed contraints on which syllables were required to be level and which oblique. The formal patterns of meter used in Modern English verse to create rhythm no longer dominate contemporary English poetry. In the case of free verse, rhythm is often organized based on looser units of