ABSTRACT
About fifteen years ago a breakthrough occurred in the study of Somali poetry when Cabdillaahi Diiriye Guuleed found vowel length to be one of the key elements in the prosody of Somali poems. With this information revealed, I was able to uncover a myriad of scansion rules which guided Somali poets as they created poetry very complex in linguistic structure. Prodding from the Polish scholar Andrzej Zaborski led to another discovery when he insisted that syllables must be taken into the analysis along with vowel lengths, the latter of which appeared to be the sole source of recurrent patterning in Somali poetry. The collaboration between Cabdillaahi and myself which followed did indeed lead to a further breakthrough when we found that syllables and moras [vowel lengths] interacted in three ways, depending on the genre of the poetry in question. We named these phenomena moro-syllabic relationships. Such scansion studies had further implications for the debate about the verbatim memorization of Somali poetry as opposed to its possible formulaic composition (not the topic of this paper, but one with which I have dealt with elsewhere in detail).
