This post
is good, but I wanted to make a few tweaks;
- Repeated sounds, determined phonetically. "Queen's castle" but not "certain castle" or "Sue's shoe."
- Repeated letters, not determined by sounds. "Certain castle" and "Sue's shoe" but not "Queen's castle."
- Repeated sounds, but not necessarily the exact sounds. "Sue's shoe" and "queen's castle" would count as alliteration but not "certain castle."
And we should still keep the current option of "allow both/all possible variations", even if people dislike the idea, hey, it's an idea nonetheless.
So it'd be:
- Repeated Sounds or Letters, only requiring one or the other; "Sues Shoes", "Queens Castle", and "Certain Castle" would all be applicable.
Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 17th 2020 at 2:41:20 PM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI just realized something. All this talk of alliteration has been focused exclusively on consonants. Words starting with vowels haven't been discussed at all.
Consonants tend to be pretty consistent in how they're pronounced. Vowels have a lot more variation. Short vowels, long vowels, schwas, etc. Added Alliterative Appeal has three A's, but only two of them have the same sound.
Looking through AlliterativeName.Tropes A To E, some examples of tropes under A that start with different sounds: Author Appeal, Author Avatar, Atrocious Alias, Anchors Away, Amusing Alien, Amoral Attorney.
And some from under E: Enter Eponymous, Emotion Eater, Evil Evolves, Excessive Evil Eyeshadow.
Just a note about the page topper and nombretomado's mod comment:
True, nobody is making us do anything. We're all here on our own volition and can stop contributing any time.
However, this thread moved way too quickly, with heated arguments. It really requires anyone who has some investment in the topic to monitor it constantly if they want to convince others why something is better/makes more sense for the page.
This started as a question about problematic edits. Then it was moved to an informal Trope Talk, though clearly with the intention to define alliteration with better clarity. It's not in official Trope Repair Shop or project threads. Then all of a sudden there appears a crowner. Page-action crowner, without specifying which page(s) it concerns. Multiple-action crowner, with only one option that had severe flaws.
Crowners are used to reach consensus and are binding. I understand that.
But the only option on the crowner was extremely nonsensical. I honestly have no idea how it got so many votes and so quickly. It's as if people wanted to get this issue away ASAP without really thinking about it and what it would bring to the wiki. Whereas other problematic tropes in TRS get hardly any attention and we're all glad if people write a single post weekly. Trope-naming crowners in TLP often get 5 votes only.
I'm glad we're allowed to have some breathing space.
Edited by XFllo on Apr 18th 2020 at 2:52:31 PM
at War Jay:
We need something that specifically says things like "Sewer Shark" are not alliteration, because these things are too vague and open to interpretation based on the sounds people think they hear.
The sources I brought up clearly say consonant sound. Not consonant spelling, or consonant orthography.
If I reverse your requirement of me, can you bring me any source that clearly states that "Sewer Shark" is alliteration?
IPA transcription:
- sewer shark (sewer
, shark in Oxford dictionary
)
- Br: /su:ə/ /ʃa:k/
- Us: /su:ər/ /ʃa:rk/
Twiddler, it's been focused on consonants because we have literally been trying to define alliteration, not assonance.
Edit: also the original issue concerned S and Sh words.
The trope covers both but this is not TRS.
Yet another reason this debate has been frustrating is that we're just trying to educate people in this pre-existing term.
The proposed crowner was about alliteration, not an attempt at redefining the trope (again this isn't TRS) so I think we ought to make it with the four discussed options.
Here
is the new crowner.
Edited by WaterBlap on Apr 18th 2020 at 9:54:37 AM
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Sorry, I must have overlooked it among all those posts.
If we allow sibilance, then it probably becomes "almost anything goes". Consider that if any combination of sibilants is good enough for two-word names or trope titles, it'll be almost meaningless.
Finding examples of sibilance as a poetic device used in a poem, and therefore a longer form, is different that finding any combinations of sibilant sounds between just two words (which is what is done for alliterative names, alliterative family or alliterative trope titles).
The new crowner looks much better. ![]()
Xfllo, the point I was trying to make wasn't that your sources did support my interpretation. It was that people could claim they did without much effort using only arguments already brought up in this thread. Because of how easy it was for me to change the meaning of the definition, the exact definitions didn't seem completely reliable as evidence because people could make arguments like the one I did, but where I made it to show a potential flaw in the reasoning, other people could make them genuinely and think that the definition supports calling Sewer Shark alliteration.
And now we see that Sibilence exists, which you claim means "anything goes", but it also proves that in academia people do use soft consonant sounds as alliteration, so please don't shoot it down just because you don't like the idea of going in that direction. It exists so it's a valid interpretation or variant of what alliteration is. It's up to the crowner whether or not we actually acknowledge it, but we can't just ignore its existence because we think it'll be below our standards.
I could argue it'd be below our standards to not acknowledge that different types of alliteration exists and that people all over the world and all throughout history have had different interpretations of what is alliterative.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallSibilant sounds wouldn't work for what we're talking about anyway. It is a varied group of sounds.
Nobody is saying that the following sentence alliterates:
Yet every word except "are" begins with a sibilant.
I'm going to toss that claim out as specious.
What's more, the source in the link is just... bad. If you look through the examples used in that link, most of the alliteration is with /s/, and other examples on that page are with sibilants and stops (such as /k/ and /b/ in words like "close" and "bees"). The source is clearly trying to alliterate first word sounds with end word sounds. But in all of our debate, we have agreed that alliteration is, at the very least, with the beginning of words. Now, I would argue (but I won't because please god let this end) that it's the beginning of syllables. But nobody here has argued, and I dare say would argue, that alliteration is about the end of a word or the end of a syllable.
That whole link is pretty much garbage.
My main point in commenting is to say the following:
- If you vote down one of the entries on the crowner, please vote up something else. Likewise, if you vote up one of the entries, please vote down something else.
- These are pretty much our only options.
- Logically, if you disagree with one of these options then you must then agree with one of the other options, as this is pretty much an exhaustive list.
I don't think I've ever made this request for a crowner, but that's because usually there is the possibility of a run-off. I can't foresee that happening after the heated debate and everything. Let's just get this over with.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Eh, I get what you mean, but there's a bunch of other sources on google as well, so at the very least it's seen as a form of alliteration even if it's not what everyone here is looking for. It's still probably at least worth acknowledging as a potential variant other people might be familiar with.
It's a specious claim that extremely different sibilant sounds alliterate.
You know what is a sibilant sound that alliterates? When the sound is literally the same. It is a rhetorically useless claim to make that sibilant sounds alliterate because "no duh" it alliterates when it is the same.
But nowhere in this debate have people been saying that sounds or letters as different as "ch" and "v" alliterate. Because they so obviously do not alliterate.
You do not need to be a pedant to hold this view.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they prettyNah, my only point is that we shouldn't completely ignore it. Like I said, it still does qualify as a type of alliteration. Not the type we're discussing here (I see that now, didn't when my bigger post was written), but it still technically is alliteration. I'm not arguing we through everything out the window to adopt Sibilance as our new definition of alliteration, just that we keep it in the back of our minds just in case it becomes relevant after all.
I'm definitely not trying to advocate for using the definition, just that we acknowledge it as a technical variant that does exist.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallSibilance is not a special word for a type of alliteration. A sibilant sound is a fricative. We have been talking about fricative sounds this whole time — /s/, /z/, and /ʃ/
are all sibilants.
Alright, good to know.
Seriously, this isn't a hill I'm trying to die on or anything, I just felt that the concept was brushed off too quickly when it could've affected the rest of the discussion/crowner. I don't really care either way otherwise.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallHey, it's not the first time we had to draw a line in the sand using an arbitrary definition (difference between dialect and language, anyone?).
While scientifically /s/ and /ʃ/ are as different as /f/ and /θ/ we consider the former to alliterate and the latter not to purely because we represent /ʃ/ with a digraph.
Idk if this helps or not but the Oxford-powered dictionary
allows for repetition of sounds or letters.
The OED is a bit complicated, because they don't define "consonant" as merely the written letter. For example, here
is an article where they define "alliteration" as "a series of words containing, or beginning with the same consonant" and then a "consonant" is "all the sounds of the alphabet apart from the vowel sounds." Reading this critically, it is likely that the OED defines the concept as sounds that begin syllables.
It should be noted that in more recent years, teachers have started considering teaching children the alphabet as sounds rather than mere letters in order to make teaching spelling easier. (That's something that I've found when I was researching how to tutor adults for the GED.)
As one might be able to tell, I love language. It's a topic I find very interesting and simultaneously simple and complicated.
Edited by WaterBlap on Apr 18th 2020 at 3:07:25 AM
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they prettyGoing to dictionary.com
, which in this case references the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, the Collins English Dictionary, and the The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, seems to define "alliteration" in a manner that includes letter-based alliteration, or at least considers "s" and "sh" to alliterate.
Specifically, these are the definitions that it gives:
2 the commencement of two or more words of a word group with the same letter, as in apt alliteration's artful aid.
Note that in the last of those, while the definition only mentions sounds, it does nevertheless consider "s" and "sh" to alliterate.
[edit]
I'm inclined to suggest altering the option that currently indicates "Both repeated sounds and repeated letters" to use "or" instead of "and": As it stands, it might be read to require both, not one or the other (or both), the latter being my understanding of the intended meaning.
[edit 2]
It's been pointed out below that I was misreading the "s" and "sh" case, for which I apologise! I've struck out the relevant sections above. ^^;
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 18th 2020 at 3:36:58 PM
My Games and Asset Packs
Ah, you're right—and that's tiredness on my part! I somehow read the first word to have an "s", not an "sh". My mistake! ^^;
Still, that's two definitions in favour of letter-based alliteration, and one against it.
[edit]
Eh, given the ambiguity of what constitutes a "consonant", let me instead score it as such:
- One definition explicitly in favour of letter-based alliteration
- One definition that may or may not favour it, depending on what it means by the word "consonant"
- And one definition that doesn't include it.
Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Apr 18th 2020 at 3:49:28 PM
My Games and Asset Packs
Crown Description:
How do we define the pre-existing term "alliteration" for the purpose of cleaning and collecting examples of Added Alliterative Appeal? The following four options have been debated at length and it's time to settle the discussion on this pre-existing term.

WaterBlap, no one is making you post here right now. Please dial it back; you're being a bit snappish.
ETA: Wonderful page-topper. Discussion is currently on what should go in a new crowner.
Edited by nombretomado on Apr 17th 2020 at 9:54:51 AM