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,
Metre (poetry) of poetic syllables will be the same as the grammatical number of syllables. Furthermore, if the accent lies on the third to last syllable, then one syllable is subtracted from the actual count, having then less poetic syllables than grammatical syllables. Spanish poetry uses poetic licenses, unique to Romance languages, to change the number of syllables by manipulating mainly the vowels in the line. Regarding these poetic licenses one must consider three kinds of phenomena: (1) syneresis, (2) dieresis and (3) hiatus There are many types of licenses, used either to add or subtract syllables, that may be applied when