Rhythm in Latvian Songs and Poems: Past and Present

During World War I (WWI) in Germany, prisoners of war were used as informants for recordings as part of an attempt to create a Sound Archive, intended to provide samples of speech and singing from around the world. As they were soldiers in the Russian army, Latvians were also recorded among other prisoners of war. Even though these recordings were very varied, they provide us with an insight in the pronunciation of Latvian more than a cen-tury ago. In this paper, we focus on Latvian songs and poems, comparing the old recordings with modern practice and usage. We examined the durations of vowels, metric feet, and poetic lines, as well as the way contrastive vowel length interacted with meter and melody. We found considerable individual variation but also a continuity from WWI to the present day.