The Origin of Rubayi Meters in Folkand Oral Poetries of Iran

It is generally believed that the origin of the Rubayi meter should be found in the meters of the pre-Islamic poetry, particularly the folk and oral poetries. Gilbert Lazard is the only person who has done a detailed analysis of the peculiarities and similarities of the Rubayi prosody with the non-prosodic features of the folk and oral poetries. This study argues that there are many stressed or semi-prosodic poems in the folk and oral poetries of Iran, the rhythm of which is very similar to the rhythm of Rubayi, but they are not related to the meter of Rubayi so far as the prosody distinction is concerned. Lazard believes that the Rubayi meter has fundamentally the same meter of the stressed and semi-prosodic local poems, but his method is rather flawed. This study, however, argues that the stressed and non-stressed syllables in the stressed poems turn into short and long quantities in prosodic poems. Moreover, the isochronism and the consonants which come after the stressed syllable or sometimes at the end of the verse, are omitted in the prosodic poems. Therefore, the isochronic meters in the stress position are firstly turned into the semi-prosodic meters and then to the fixed linguistic and quantitative meters.