I like my friend’s Louai’s name a lot. It dawned on me that perhaps this had something to do with the high concentration of vowels in his name. To test the theory, I set out to write poetry with lots of vowels.
Processing an English word list is relatively easy although picking the most appropriate processing strategy proved more challenging.
At first I set out to get words with a high concentration ratio of vowels to consonants. Unfortunately, this tends to privilege shorter words with less letters overall where it is easier to score a high ratio—words like “a” or “are.”. Out of curiosity, I also experimented with words with a high “number of consonants subtracted from number of values” number which gave me a other nice vowel-heavy words—how about a poem set in Ouagadougou?
I don’t claim the words I received were the best words possible but I thought the poetry was quite nice sounding with the high emphasis on vowels (for the sake of simplicity, I included ‘y’ as a vowel).
My first poem was a political poem:
courageously initiate equality: audacious idea
evacuate Europeanization
uneasy euphorianay
reinitialize, reevaluate
obituary
zealously enjoy your opiate
obey
Because too much seriously is just unhealthy, I wrote a rather raunchy sex poem to balance things out:
eyeful: your beauteous aureole, buoyancy
initiate
cautiously auto in your avenue
aerosolize joyous mayonnaise
oily opaque ooze
epilogue: goates inadequate
You can download the perl scripts I used to get the words here:
- http://mako.yukidoke.org/scripts/vowel_to_consonant-ratio.pl
- http://mako.yukidoke.org/scripts/vowel_to_consonant.pl
Use the code as you wish but please send me patches or improvements.