I am finishing up Pars I of Lingua Latina, and was surprised at the typography here.
What is the motivation for the ties? I would have thought that it’s the diphthong that it looks like without them. And the meter confirms it. Is Orberg letting us know that deinde, despite being written as one word throughout, is sometimes pronounced as “de inde = d’ inde”? (Which also fits the meter, so maybe it’s not a diphthong…) Or is “ei” not a common diphthong in Latin? After noticing this, I scanned through a couple of pages and was surprised not to see “ei” anywhere else. (In the fifth declension it’s eī, and I have taken the macron on a digraph to always signal two vowels throughout Orberg.)
Ei is not a particularly common diphthong. Given that in 20+ years of studying Latin, I did not realize that the ei was a diphthong in deinde (I had always pronounced it with 3 syllables), the ‘tie’ is probably meant to indicate that it is a diphthong. Your question has served to correct that error on my part, so thanks.
Dein is morphologically two syllables but is routinely collapsed into a single long one. The phenomenon is known as synizesis.
These are hendecasyllables (eleven-syllables), one of Catullus’ favorite meters. Each line kicks off with three long syllables followed by a double short (da mi basia), then long-short-long-short-long-long (mille deinde centum).
It’s an easily memorable verse-form, quite catchy:
“vivamus mea Lesbi’ atqu’ amemus.”
Yes, it really is. I thought that I would have nothing but trouble with it when I saw Orberg’s description of the verse pattern: “spondeum, dactylum, duos trochaeos, spondeum aut trochaeum (pes primus rarius iambus aut trochaeus est).” But it bounces along if I am careful to punch the downbeats. Latin poetry, for whatever reason, is so much easier for me than Greek, despite much more effort on the Greek (I begin to suspect the accents…).
Here, the three lines beginning with, “Da mi basia mille…,” seem like they might come in useful in certain circumstances, if committed to memory. To be used only for metrical purposes, of course.
Orberg never recorded the final chapters, but given how he read “Quot caelum stellas, tot habet tua Roma puellas,” in an earlier chapter, it may be for the best. “ScorpioMartianus” on Youtube records this chapter, but, well, he’s not really feeling the rhythm here: https://youtu.be/DcEDRzToJgk?t=684
He says:
This recording is unique in that it preserves all long and short vowels and syllables, as well as the correct scansion and rhythm of the phrase, exactly as encountered in Ancient Roman poetry.
This does not really relate to your initial question, but since you brought up the topic of recordings, I want to point out that there is a musical interpretation of this poem done by “Tyrtarion”:
