A Study on the Recognition of Fixed-form Verses in the Japanese Classic Poetry

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A lot of poems in Manyoushu, a collection of Japanese Classic Poetry, contain hypermetric phrases and it should be noted that most of these phrases include continuous vowels. As can be inferred from this, people at that time should have considered these poems with hypermetric phrases as a fixed-form verse by slurring the continuous vowels. Investigating variant manuscripts of Manyoshu, we found that the regulations of hypermetric phrases became less and less strict with time, which might mean that people had forgotten how to chant these poems at some point in time.