Two utterances are said to rhyme if their final sequences of sounds are identical or similar.
The rhyming sequence may involve one syllable (single rhymes),
two syllables (double rhymes) or occasionally three syllables.
There are two systems of rhyme which have been used in Cornish verse,
the Brythonic system and the Germanic system; this dictionary caters for both.
They both use single and double rhymes; the only difference is that the Brythonic system
allows rhymes between stressed and unstressed syllables,
but the Germanic system does not.
The Germanic system is used in English, German and Dutch;
when translating verse from English, especially songs and hymns,
it may be appropriate to use this system rather than the Brythonic.
In this system, the syllables which count as rhyming at the end of a line
are the last syllable which is stressed plus any subsequent syllables.
Double rhymes (sometimes called female rhymes) have two syllables,
stressed followed by unstressed,
e.g. Little Jack Horner / sat in a corner.
Triple rhymes of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
are used in English mainly in comic verse,
e.g. I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal and mineral;
(Note that this is not a perfect rhyme in English).
Rhymes of this type are found in the play Bewnans Ke,
but the rhyming words are either loan-words
(e.g. beowta ‘beauty’ rhyming with reowta ‘royalty’) or are in lines wholly in Latin.
The Brythonic system is used in the mystery plays of Middle Cornish,
and extensively in Welsh and Breton verse.
In single rhymes, only the last syllable in each line is rhymed,
and this syllable may be stressed or unstressed,
e.g. the first two lines of the Charter Endorsement: Golsoug ty coweʒ / byʒ na borʒ meʒ.
The possible rhyming sequences for single rhymes are V, VC and VCC,
where V is a vocoid (vowel or diphthong), and C is a consonant.
e.g. tre 'town', tren 'train', trenk 'acid'.
Double rhymes usually consist of a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable,
e.g. from Bewnans Meryasek: ke ha dus pan vy plesyes / myns may hallen sur esyes.
Fewer than 5% of the rhymes in the Cornish texts are double, except in Bewnans Ke,
in which about 25% of the rhymes are double.
If the rhyming sequences of two words are identical,
then the rhyme between then is said to be congruent (kowlberfydh).
e.g. gul 'to do' ≡ Sul 'Sunday'.
If the quality of the vocoids and the consonants is the same,
but one word has a stressed final syllable and the other has an unstressed final syllable,
then the term perfect (perfydh) is used for the rhyme.
e.g. lever 'says' = ker 'dear'.
Other rhymes are classified as poor (kraghrimyow).
There were two contradictory ways of dealing with poor rhymes.
(a) One of the words in the pair was deliberately mis-spelled
so that both had the same spelling for the rhyming sequence;
this is an eye rhyme (rim an lagaz).
Some eye-rhymes were forced with outrageous spellings, e.g. at BM.1971,
goth 'old' is mis-spelled goeth in order to make an eye-rhyme with meneth 'mountain'.
(b) It was recognized that the two words were pronounced differently
by spelling them differently; most commonly,
-V1C would be rhymed with -V2C, which is known as a half-rhyme (hanter-rim).
Whereas Middle Welsh and Middle Breton poetry show intricate patterns
(cynghanedd and internal rhymes respectively),
Middle Cornish verse is based on rhyming ensembles.
A rhyming ensemble comprises a group of words
which could form congruent, perfect or near-perfect rhymes.
The ensembles are orthographically based
in that the rhyming sequences in a given ensemble are all spelled the same way,
or nearly so, allowing for the vagaries of medieval spelling.
Nevertheless they are underlain by phonetics.
e.g. Middle Cornish words such as meth 'shame', roweth 'importance', beth 'grave',
nasweth 'needle' all belong to the ℛeth rhyming ensemble,
even though their rhyming sequences are [-'ęːθ], [-'ɛθ], [-'ęːð], [-'ɛð] respectively.
The sign ℛ is used to denote a rhyming ensemble;
the following part of the name of the ensemble is based on the Middle Cornish orthography,
which tends to use graphs denoting unvoiced consonants.
(For ensembles containing /o/, the KK digraph oe is used
rather than the Middle Cornish oy, to avoid confusion).
There are 212 rhyming ensembles in the dictionary.
In the rhyming dictionary, rhyming ensembles are divided into sets.
Rhymes between any two words in a set are perfect.
The sets are divided into tables;
rhymes between any two words in the same table are congruent.
Those tables labelled "full list" aspire to be exhaustive;
others list just a selection of rhyming words.
Some tables have more than one heading, if the words have different sources,
but all of the words therein have congruent rhyming sequences.