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,
Madrigal (poetry) about eighty. They are serious, brief, irregular lyrics, in which neither the amatory nor the complimentary tone is by any means obligatory. Some of these pieces contain as few as six lines, one as many as fourteen, but they average from nine to eleven. In the majority of examples the little poem opens with a line of six syllables, and no line extends beyond ten syllables. The madrigal appears to be a short "canzone" of the Tuscan type, but less rigidly constructed. In French the madrigal has not this Italian character. It is simply a short piece of verse, ingenious