Rhythm and Meter

● Meter is rhythmic pattern● Latin poetry uses a small number of easily

identifiable rhytmic patterns

English Poetry

● Much English poetry has meter too● Compare the following excerpts:

● Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

(Shakespeare, Henry V)

● Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred

(The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

● The first quote is made up of repeating patterns of two syllables each

● The second is made up of three-syllable patterns (with some exceptions).

● We call those groups of syllables “feet”

Emphasis

● What creates the sense of rhythm in English is the interplay of emphasized and unemphasized syllables.

● We mark emphasis like so: ● And so we can diagram the lines to mark their

rhythm – this is what we call “scanning”

● Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

(Shakespeare, Henry V)

● That line had five pairs of syllables, with the emphasis always on the second syllable

● We call that unit (or “foot”) an iamb● Because there are five imabic feet in the line,

we call it iambic pentameter

● Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward

● Here there's one emphasized syllable followed by two unemphasized ones

● We call that a dactyl● There are four feet in the line (yes, the fourth

one is different – don't worry about that for now)

● So it's dactylic tetrameter

What about Latin?

● Latin poetic rhythm works in basically the same way, with one very important difference:

● Emphasis is irrelevant to rhythm● Rhythm is achieved by varying between

long and short syllables● Roughly speaking, long syllables take twice as

long to say as short ones – two beats versus one beat.

Like singing, but not

● So what makes a syllable long or short?● In English, we can also create a sense of

rhythm (especially when singing, or rapping) by deliberately pronouncing syllables quickly or slowly

● That's not how it works in Latin

● In Latin words, the length of a syllable is built-in

● This is great, because it means that when we read a poem, we can see, or hear, it's rhythm without the benefit of musical notation.

● So long as we know the rules!

The Rules

1 What makes a syllable

2 What makes a vowel sound short or long

3 When can syllables with only short vowels nevertheless be long (as far as rhythm is concerned)

● Compare:– Aes : one syllable– Ea: two syllables– Eo: two syllables– Foedus: two syllables– Aurum: two syllables– Tua: two syllables

Vowels

● So what makes a syllable “long”?● Usually a syllable is long if it has a long vowel

sound in it– Dipthongs are always long sounds– All single vowels can be pronounced long or short

– When single vowels are supposed to be pronounced long, your grammar and vocab lessons wrote them with a “Macron” mark over them

● e.g. audiō– In other words, when single vowels are “naturally”

long, you're just supposed to remember that from learning the word in your vocab (because normal texts of Latin poetry don't write the macrons in for you)

– But don't panic! Even if your memory for macrons is sketchy, you can usually figure out the vowel length from the rhythm, rather than the other way round.

– And a good deal of the time, you'll remember the length of verb and noun endings – e.g.

● Servō (dative singular)● puellā (ablative singular)● Portīs (dative/ablative plural)● Audiō (first person singular)● And so on...

“Long by Position”

● Since Latin poetic rhythm is about length of syllables, rather than of vowels, there's one more, very important rule.

● If two consonants directly follow a vowel (e.g. dant) - including double consonants (e.g. correptus) - we must imagine that it takes longer than usual to speak that syllable.

● This is true even if one consonant is a the end of a word, and the next begins the next word

● And we say that the syllable is “long by position”

● Note: some people say that this happens when a syllable ends with a consonant

● This is technically true, since syllables usually start with single consonants. In a pair or cluster of consonants, the first would be assigned to the end of the previous syllable

● e.g. cor-rep-tus● But this way of putting it can be confusing,

especially since we have to assign the last consonant to the start of the next word...

● Just think in terms of consonant clusters

Time to practice!

● We'll diagram (“scan”) some single latin words, using a line to mark long syllables, and a short upward arc to mark short ones:

– Long =– Short =

regina

regina

regina

Two long vowels, one short

regina

placida

placida

placida

Three short vowels

placida

taedae

taedae

Two long syllables

taedae

mentem

Long by position!

mentem

mentem

succumbere

Long by position!

succumbere

Again, Long by position!

succumbere

3rd conj. infinitives have short linking vowels: capere, facere

succumbere

Others have long ones: spectāre, habēre, audīre

succumbere

● That's it for now – run through this lesson a couple more times if you like, then move on to the next moodle lesson, where you'll learn about dividing a line up into feet.

● You'll also learn two more very important rules about the length of syllables in latin verse:– Rules for elision– Mute and liquid consonant clusters

● Note, too, that in the practice activities for this lesson, there's a copy of the relevant pages from Bennet's New Latin Grammar. The initial section, on the natural lengths of vowels in Latin, is especially useful at this stage.