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,
Syllabic verse in one verse tradition will typically not fit in another. Humans can perceive the number of members in a small set without actually counting them or mentally breaking them into subsets; the upper limit of this ability is estimated at between 5 and 9 units, and this seems to hold true in sequences of audible stimuli (e.g. syllables in a line of verse); so it is no surprise that syllabic hemistichs tend to be very short (typically 4 to 8 syllables), and to be grouped — and therefore separated from their neighbors — by markers such as stress, word boundary,