Categorization Table for Persian Poetic Meters and Naming Method of Meters

Categorization of Persian poetic meters is one of the most important problems of prosody and one of the most fundamental preoccupations of modern Persian prosodists. After explaining and evaluating the effectiveness of Khalil bin Ahmad’s method of classifying Arabic poetic meters, a “table of Persian poetic meters” has been proposed to complement the efforts of such prosodists as Laurence Paul Elwell-Sutton and Abolhassan Najafi. The proposed table contains 11 families of meters. Of these, the first nine rows are muttafiq al- ’arkân or single-foot-type meters (i.e., each consisting of a repeated foot) while rows 10 and 11 are mutanâwib al-’arkân or alternate-foot meters (i.e., each consisting of two types of feet alternately repeated) as presented in Najafi’s circle, which contains 52 families of meters. In addition to presenting a formula for identifying meters in the table, this article suggests a new method of naming them, a subject that has been completely ignored by contemporary prosodists.