К вопросу о метрической классификации размеров тайской поэзии

Известия РАН. Серия литературы и языка. 2020. Т. 79. № 2. С. 39–49.

Sarkisov I.

The aim of this research is to classify traditional Thai poetic meters in terms of the modern approaches to verse and look for their possible typological counterparts in other versification systems. The methods of the research include analyzing of a corpus of Thai classical poems and some previous studies about different Thai meters. This topic is worthy of note, because, though the 700-year-old Thai poetic tradition has a very rich literature heritage, Thai poetic meters have never been described in terms of modern verse theories and compared to other poetic traditions. Our study seems to clear new ground in this respect. Our study shows that there are three main Thai meters: klon, chan and khlong. Klon can easily be classified as a syllabic and chan as a syllabo- metrical meter. The most difficult for classification is khlong. In this meter each line should contain a certain number (7 or 9) of syllables and at the same time certain syllables should be marked by one of diacritical symbols mai tho and mai ek. These symbols are used for tone marking, but in modern Thai none of them is a symbol of a certain tone: the tone depends on both the diacritical symbol and a class of the consonant (all Thai consonant letters belong to one of 3 classes). In view of this, we cannot identify khlong as a determined sequence of tones, but should call it a determined sequence of graphemes. Accordingly, the best decision would be to introduce a special term “syllabo-graphic meter” for classifying khlong. Such type of meter does not have any analogues in other poetic traditions, which makes Thai poetry unique.

Keywords: метрика, metrics, тайский язык, Thai Language, языки Юва