Rhyme in 16th-Century Hungarian Historical Songs: A Pilot Study

This article presents a computer-based stichometric analysis of 26 Hungarian historical songs from the 16th century. We explore the validity of comments made by Albert Szenci Molnár in 1607 about the poor quality and simplicity of stanza structures in the poetry of previous generations. The study shows how rhyming changed in this poetic genre between 1539 and 1598. In this respect, it is the first work to explore these changes through a quantitative analysis. We find that during the examined period, there was a marked decline in the frequency of rhymes based on the repetition of the same word. At the same time, the tendency to maintain a rhyme across multiple stanzas did not change significantly