Much more common are the words whose form is identified only by their quantity: amīcitia can be nominative singular or ablative singular, cīvis can be nominative or genitive singular or accusative plural, and manus can be nominative singular or nominative or accusative plural, etc. Latin has a number of virtual homonyms, distinguished only by their quantity, such as lěvis ("light") and lēvis ("smooth"). Ideally we would all know, say, that the first syllable of miles was long and the second one short, but in practice we are often uncertain, or even wrong, and it sometimes necessary to consult a dictionary solely to ascertain the quantities of a word.Īn additional problem is that it is often necessary to know the meaning of a Latin word before one can know its prosody. All diphthongs are normally long by nature, but individual vowels can be either long or short, though a vowel followed by another vowel not in a diphthong is normally short. Whereas English meters are based on a word's accent ("Múch have I trávelled in the reálms of góld”), Latin meters are based on quantity what matters most is whether syllables are long or short.įor most of us the obstacle to reading Latin verse aloud is that we have not learned the quantities of Latin very well. Raven, Latin Metre: an Introduction (Cambridge, 1965). Since the Amores may well be among the first Latin poems a student encounters, it may be helpful to provide a brief introduction to the rules of Latin prosody (the quantity of individual syllables) and to the reading aloud of elegiac couplets. To begin to look at graphic scansion, we first must look at a couple of symbols that are used to scan a poem.Prosody | Eli sion | The Elegiac Couplet | Reading Aloud For a discussion of the others, I refer you to Fussell, page 18. Since the most commonly and most easily used is graphic, we will use it in our discussion. There are three kinds of scansion: the graphic, the musical and the acoustic. This technique is called scansion, and it is important because it puts visual markers onto an otherwise entirely heard phenomenon. To get a bearing on what these rhythms look and sound like, let's start with a method for writing out the rhythms of a poem. The former is the more common adherence to the latter often leads an English language poet toward self-conscious verse, as their predictable rhythms are counter to natural English speech (not that it is impossible to create great verse with this technique, but there is a tendency for it to end up so). For this reason most English language poets opt to look at their own meter as accentual or accentual-syllabic. There may be one, two, or three syllables between accents (or more, but this is a matter of debate). This means that its natural rhythms are not found naturally from syllable to syllable, but rather from one accent to the next. English, being of Germanic origin, is a predominantly accentual language. Of the ways of looking at meter, the most common in English are those that are accentual. Quantitative: Measures the duration of words.Accentual-syllabic: A counting of syllables and accents.Accentual: A counting of accents only per line.Syllabic: A general counting of syllables per line.Fussell defines meter as "what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance." (4-5) To "meter" something, then, is to "measure" it (the word meter itself is derived from the Greek for measure), and there are four common ways to view meter. Although some of Fussell's ideas are a bit outdated (namely, he doesn't deal with the visual elements of a poem), his approach is complete, concise and useful. The bible of most poets today regarding meter and sound is a book by Paul Fussell called Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. The crafting of the aural aspects of a poem is what we may call "ear training." Thus, the crafting of the visual aspects is what we'd call "eye training." Meter Writing Letters of Recommendation for StudentsĪ brief exploration of the various aspects of sound that can be utilized when making a poem.
0 kommentar(er)
