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<font face="Calibri">Jay,<br>
<br>
Several remarks:<br>
<br>
</font>
<blockquote
cite="mid:1398830346.41201.YahooMailNeo@web163104.mail.bf1.yahoo.com"
type="cite">
<div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff;
font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial,
Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:14pt">In French
versification theory ca. 1500, the end of a line is either
feminine or masculine depending on whether the second last
syllable or the last syllable is accented. </div>
</blockquote>
French syllables are not really accented. I think that the real
point is whether the line ends with an «e muet» (mute E), which is
certainly unaccented, hardly pronounced and always short (it cannot
be lengthened in singing, for instance). The reason of the term
probably is that, in French, the grammatical feminine often is
obtained by adding a mute E at the end of the word.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:1398830346.41201.YahooMailNeo@web163104.mail.bf1.yahoo.com"
type="cite">
<div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff;
font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial,
Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:14pt">In French, a
grammatically masculine word might or might not refer to
something that is semantically gendered masculine and a
grammatically feminine word might or might not refer to
something that is semantically gendered as feminine. <br>
</div>
</blockquote>
Isn't it so that 'semantical gender' is linked to the language?
Things may be semantically gendered masculine in one language,
feminine in another. I think that, in French semantics, anything
that is gendered feminine is grammatically feminine; grammatically
masculine words may also denote something that is semantically
ungendered ("neutral")... I suppose that there are exceptions, but
they must be exceptional and I can think of none just now.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:1398830346.41201.YahooMailNeo@web163104.mail.bf1.yahoo.com"
type="cite">
<div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff;
font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial,
Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:14pt">Does anyone know
whether, and if so, how and when, the phonological/prosodic
terms were adopted to deal with musical metre and phrase
structure?</div>
</blockquote>
Browsing through my files, I am surprised that this adoption indeed
is rarely documented in French, even although the terminology itself
seems to me common in French. I found the following:<br>
– Rameau, Traité, 1722, deals with the treatment of words with a
feminine ending, and the example he gives (p. 161) also is one of
musical feminine ending; but he does not formally use the term in
the case of the music. He says on p. 339 that if a cadence is not on
the first beat, it usually is a consequence of a feminine rhyme.<br>
– Momigny, La seule vraie théorie de la musique, 1821, often speaks
of feminine endings: see for instance the second example on p. 21,
and passim.<br>
<br>
This does not mean that there are no other cases, but I didn't find
them.<br>
<br>
Nicolas Meeùs<br>
Professeur émérite<br>
Université Paris-Sorbonne<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:nicolas.meeus@scarlet.be">nicolas.meeus@scarlet.be</a><br>
<br>
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