Haiku and 'the natural rythmn of japanese'

[xBlackWolfx]

I never really understood haiku, until i read something somewhere (i believe on a site where some japanese guy was teaching japanese) that a haiku is meant to exploit the natural rythmn of japanese. I read some japanese haikus, and i admit they do certainly sound alot better than the english ones i've always heard.

If this is true, i'd like to do the same thing with my conlang. It would be interesting to have a language where you can read a poem with the same rythmn that you normally speak, unlike english where you have to learn to use this non-english intonation pattern.

How could i go about doing that? I'm not really into having sentences follow the intonation pattern of english poems, nor do i really want a free-form word order. I was actually considering having phonemic stress.

[Micamo]

Japanese has pitch accent, which may be just a phonemic downstep. (I don't know that much about Japanese, you may wanna ask someone else about this specifically.) This is probably what you're referring to.

[teh_Foxx0rz]

Japanese is also syllable (or perhaps more technically mora) timed, that is, each syllable (particularly in kana) is always the same length (and a long vowel should be twice as long as a normal syllable), so each syllable always receives the same emphasis in normal speech (which is where pitch-accent comes in).
It also perhaps helps that Japanese doesn't really have any consonant clusters to speak of, so things come out easier.

[Trailsend]

If this is true, i'd like to do the same thing with my conlang. It would be interesting to have a language where you can read a poem with the same rythmn that you normally speak, unlike english where you have to learn to use this non-english intonation pattern.

Iambic meter, famous for its use in Shakespeare's sonnets, is supposed to mirror fluent English cadence. For example, this entire post is in iambic meter, and it doesn't sound unnatural at all.