I didn’t express myself very well, and you are of course correct. What I was trying to say was simply that we should not expect Greek accent rules, in general, to map onto Latin or Celtic or any other language family. E.g., there is no reason to expect that an accented long penult in Latin preceding a short ultima should be “properispomenon” like Greek any more so than we would expect that pattern in Celtic or Old English.
I should take this opportunity to correct another inaccurate statement I made. When I said that OE poetry has a quantitative meter like Latin, I knew what I meant but I failed to express it. OE poets were not writing dactylic hexameters, obviously. The meter was based on alliteration and stress, but syllable quantity appears to have been taken into account as well. That’s all I was trying to say.
Linux has Ceres, a fantastic spectral domain editor. Many standard soundfile editors include spectral displays, but if you want a pitch contour graph[*] (as opposed to a frequency domain display) I’m not sure what’s available for the Mac. Maybe SoundHack does it ?
At Ovid X,25 (Metamorphoses, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice) I came across this phrase:
… crescentesque abstulit annos.
Now I ask you educated Textkats: Where is the accent ? The elision after the enclitic creates this effect :
… crescentesquabstulit …
If absolutely no hiatus is employed, this little nugget poses some difficulties. By grammatical law the accent should occur on the third syllable of crescentesque, but that law must be abrogated by the elision, ne c’est pas ? In effect, the elision creates a word of six syllables, a rather confusing situation for one reciting the poem.
One way out of the quandary is to remain neutral throughout crescentes (i.e. trying to avoid heavy stress on any particular syllable) and accenting the first syllable of “quabstulit”, but is this correct pronuciation ?
How would you pronounce it ?
Btw, setting accent apart from ictus is a common musical effect known as syncopation, and it is precisely the kind of thing I would expect from the poets. Read a Shakespeare sonnet with all accents on the iambic ictus, it’s a superb way to annihilate any poetry. The play of accent against the metrical requirement is an artistic effect valuable in its own right, much employed by the Latin poets.
I ignore natural word stress and stress the ictus. Some think this heretical.
I do try to make heavy syllables heavy and light syllables light, but inevitably they are of different durations. Clearly the heavy syllable in the “quabst” part of -que abstulit is of different duration from the first long of the verse, the “vi” in vipera. In any case, here is where I put the stresses in the line:
Adriane, I must confess that I have little musical ability, but when I pronounce those words there isn’t any particularly noticable pitch variation. I thought you were alluding to having learned the same accents under discussion now.
Cantator, as for the elision — it does not become one word. Naturally an enclitic makes the main word and the enclitic into one word, but this is not a property of elision. Elision is not an artificial poetical device; it is merely a natural property of the language, just as it is in French, Italian, Spanish to a lesser degree, and others. Thus crescentesqabstulit.
The play of accent against the metrical requirement is an artistic effect valuable in its own right, much employed by the Latin poets.
I think he’s referring to the conflict between the natural word accents and the long syllable of each foot. The earilest Latin meter, the Saturnian, was possibly/probably (though it’s still uncertain) qualitative, based on stress. While later poets adopted the qualitaive Greek meters, they often kept an element of that stress-based poetry and played it against the quantitative meter to create a contrast.
I didn’t express myself very well, and you are of course correct. What I was trying to say was simply that we should not expect Greek accent rules, in general, to map onto Latin or Celtic or any other language family. E.g., there is no reason to expect that an accented long penult in Latin preceding a short ultima should be “properispomenon” like Greek any more so than we would expect that pattern in Celtic or Old English.
I would not have exspected Greek accent rules to map onto Latin or any other language either. Yet Adrian brought clearly to my attention that the way I had been speaking Latin closely matched the descriptions of Romans who demonstrated the pitch accent system of Latin, a system which resembles the Greek in some ways. Although this was at first a surprise, Latin and Greek share multiple features in common, in pronunciation generally, in vocabulary, and especially in constant syllable length (by which I mean, the syllable ast will always be long, whether in the word aster or asterós or astronomia — this syllable is longer relative to other syllables, regardless of its position in a word or the accentation or stress within that word).
Understand that this has been a personal experience for me. I was just as skeptical as yourself in the beginning, as this very thread shows. I was so surprised when I heard what I was doing; I would never have guessed. And all I was doing was speaking Latin with strict syllable quantity and vowel quality. [Let me emphasize here again that all languages have pitch variation, some more regular than others, and for great authors like Allen to write ‘Latin had no pitch’ is tantamount to saying ‘Latin had no vowels’.] And when I allowed pitch variation to effect my speech, without controlling the process conciously, the result was pitch variation in a manner that matched up with grammarians both ancient and Renascence. This is what Adrian brought to my attention.
I’d like to add that I welcome you, Didyme, to discuss these topics with us via voce by means of Skype, if you like. Trying to ramble on with these rather feable letters does little to convey the true meaning of sound.
While later poets adopted the qualitaive Greek meters, they often kept an element of that stress-based poetry and played it against the quantitative meter to create a contrast.
I use underline to indicate long syllables, acute accent for word stress.
The first half of most Vergilian hexametre has word stress out of sync with syllable length, while the second half tends to be concordant.
Yes, I understand this clearly enough, but as I said, in effect that is exactly what happens, unless you’re consciously separating the words (which then of course destroys the elision).
Why are the ancient manuscripts written without word separation ?
Elision is not an artificial poetical device; it is merely a natural property of the language, just as it is in French, Italian, Spanish to a lesser degree, and others. Thus > crescen> tes> q> abs> tulit> .
Yes, I understand this also, but the poets do hardly anything without being conscious about their effects.
Perhps Adrianus can shed some light on the effect of elision upon accent ?
Btw, did you intend to reduce -que to -q ?
The play of accent against the metrical requirement is an artistic effect valuable in its own right, much employed by the Latin poets.
Sorry? This I don’t follow.
Ictus is an aspect of meter, separable from accent. Accent is, as you say, a natural property of a words in a language, and in Latin poetry it may or may not occur on the metrical beat.
Added: Your example from the 1st eclogue is a perfect example of this play. The metrical scansion and the accents do not coincide (are out of sync, as you put it).
Thank God we’re not discussing the intent and employment of the caesura.
Lucus, if I understand you correctly, you overlay a pitch accent atop the “standard” stress accent when speaking Latin, and this pitch corresponds well to the rules of Greek accentuation. Not being particularly familiar with the ancient grammarians, do any of them recommend this? The discussion in Allen and elsewhere seems to be “stress vs. pitch.” Do any grammarians advocate stressing certain syllables and using the Greek pitch system? Basically I was under the impression that, for most of them anyway, this was an either/or distinction.
As for Skype, I will look into it. I’ve never used it before. I would be interested in hearing your Latin pronunciation.
Didyme care,
Lucus may reply soon, but it’s certainly my understanding of the early grammarians (reading in Keil, and some discussion about quantity–or stress–notwithstanding) that predominantly the grammarians emphasize accentus (or tonus) as the distinguishing mark and sound (in writing and in speech). And that tradition is unbroken to the seventeenth century. Some evidence for that is presented in foregoing parts of the thread. Only by reading quotes from secondary sources in isolation is it possible, I think, to maintain that there were dissenting voices in the tradition; and I think that is inaccurate anyway, because the whole authority of any grammarian’s position depends on consistency with the tradition. Each in a new period brings nuances and refinements, not radical overhauls. The tradition is that ACCENTUS distinguishes the ‘stressed’ syllable, NOT tempus and NOT quantity (although tempus --or vowel length and its relation to verse metre-- and quantity --or volume stress-- each plays a part is determining what accentus --or tonus–is applied and where). Given the sophistication of analysis within the tradition, it should be taken as the case, that pitch characterizes taught pronunciation. (Differences between ‘received’ Latin and regional accenting must be another matter).
Adrianus
The following link (especially the third example in it) takes up another aspect of reading Latin. (Incidentally, I now know what the English for Swedish ‘ljudning’ is. It’s ‘phonating’!)
Imagine silently mouthing ‘To be or not to be’. I sometimes wish (“I’m on the subway”) cell-phone users had learnt the art … (but that’ll require 5G, 6G or 7G technology, I guess ).
Interaxus
That’s a really good point, about reading aloud versus interiorizing sound. As well as Roman poetic practice it also has a bearing, I think, on ritual and religious practice and the place of incantation within in. Reading text without spaces and punctuation, and you sound and relate to the elementary syllables in a different way. Font design, I think, can be just as important in drawing attention beyond what is actually written to the meaning of the text on another level, tied into the design aethetics. Since so much writing in the european medieval period was religion-related, I don’t think it too strange to say that writing itself in a monastery was a further form of celebrating ‘the Word’. Poring over facsimiles of early-medieval manuscripts has an almost narcotic effect that I used to think distracted from the meaning of the written text but, in fact, is probably intimately bound-up with the meaning of the text on another level. (Initially, I’d have to approach the texts on that level anyway, since I couldn’t actually read them then; and lack of sleep and being hungry also puts you into these ‘narcotic’ or ‘aesthetic’ heightened states.) All these, unpacking the sound in ways that direct attention to constituent elements of the word, and ‘dreaming’ the words through the font aesthetics, might be considered to serve in exploring the relationship between the word and the world and the divine. Just different approaches to how we approach the written word today, as Harris says about reading aloud (in your link above).
Adrianus
I’m going to kvetch for a moment here, so bear with me, please.
I’ve read many of William Harris’s essays and articles, and in most respects I enjoy and esteem his work. However, some of his assertions in this presentation are simply off the freakin’ beam.
“In effect Romans read on what for us would be a 7 year old level, but the value of this slow reading was immense. They actually HEARD poetry as they read it, and were tuned to the sound of words as we cannot hope to be.”
I cry “Foul!” here. Why does he conclude that the Romans read on “what for us would be a 7 year old level” ? Because they read slowly ?! Further, it takes no remarkable skill to hear the poetry in your inner ear. Trained musicians can hear music as they read it without playing it, and this is no uncommon feat. I’ll go so far as to suggest that you ought to be able to hear the poetry without actually sounding it.
As to his statement that the Romans “… were tuned to the sound of words as we cannot hope to be”, all I can add is that that is one dismal conclusion. Are we sunk so low that we can’t hear in our heads what we read as we read it ? I say “Bullsh” again. I do it all the time. Does anyone honestly think I’m just parsing grammar when I read Ovid or Catullus ?
To reiterate a tip: Spend some time reading high-quality poetry in your own language, silently, aloud, silently again, then aloud again. Now try the same with some Latin verse.
Btw, when Ivy’s (dimidium maior meum) daughter had trouble reading school assignments I suggested she read them aloud. Yes, it took her more time, but (and here I’m in full agreement with WH) her comprehension was greatly improved. She still does it whenever she’s confused by a text.
You know the one about the one-eyed man in the country of the blind ? I think it needs recast re: the land of the ADHD-addled.
Font design, I think, can be just as important in drawing attention beyond what is actually written to the meaning of the text on another level, tied into the design aethetics. Since so much writing in the european medieval period was religion-related, I don’t think it too strange to say that writing itself in a monastery was a further form of celebrating ‘the Word’.
Agreed absolutely. Quaere: Did the Romans do likewise, (I know very little about manuscript preparation in the Classical period), or did that beautiful scripting appear first in the Medieval period ?
Cantator care,
As you said about the Harris link above, I think, too, that it’s misleading to liken Roman reading to the way an average seven-year-old will read.
Others can give better accounts of Roman calligraphy. Looking at Wikipedia on Roman cursive, the example given looks pretty crude. There are much lovelier examples in Jean Mallon, L’Ecriture Latine de la Capitale Romaine à la Minuscule (Paris, 1939), and of rustic. That’s always going to be the way: any script done with care will look pleasing compared to a scribbled example. And the uncial and half-uncial scripts that I used to think were particularly Irish --Book of Kells, say (I’m from Ireland) --were common in the Roman Empire from the third century on. There were lots of new creative influences on scripts, I guess, when Rome lost its centralised-governmental grip. Carolingian minuscule --that today’s more standard fonts are commonly based on --has a real beauty to it, too. Just a more functional aesthetic. It’s a relief to see gothic script dropping out of English-Latin textbooks as the sixteenth-century advances,–the English in Gothic, the Latin in italic (sort of new Roman cursive) and Trajan and standing out beautifully, by comparison. The gothic fonts must have used loads more ink, and bled a lot more, and are pretty hard to read while not even looking pretty (but maybe that’s just personal taste). Some scribes’ versions of uncial and half-uncial can be ambiguous in some letter combinations, but they look very nice. I have, also, A. S. Ostley’s Calligraphy and Paleography (London, 1965) and his Scribes and Sources (London,1980) and some other histories of lettering, so I only know bits and pieces; but I recommend the Ostley titles as good reads (even if they don’t concentrate on the Romans). The Jean Mallon book contains A3 illustrations that are great, but it may be hard to get. I just happens to be in the local University library.
Adrianus
Cantator, briefly about reading aloud: the concept of reading silently really did not develop as we know it before a few centuries ago. Even in Jane Austin you read how characters will always read a letter aloud, or leave the room to read it to themselves, aloud. So it was also for the Romans. It is extremely important to practice reciting Latin aloud, far more even than English since we have the opportunity to hear our own tongue so often. Nisi loqueris, nescis.
That most of us (in schools and among teachers) have lost the appreciation for poetry aloud is præcisely the reason that poetry has suffered so terribly the past century. Verse doesn’t matter to modern poets because there is no living sound they ever exspect to be applied to their words. It’s really a tragic ignorance. I once heard someone say they liked reading Shakespeare silently rather than hearing it — I gasped audibly.
It is an interesting thesis that the decline of poetic appreciation is proportional to the decline of reading aloud. I wonder if this is arguable, or perhaps the argument has already been made?
That’s very interesting. It also seems rather categorical. Can we be absolutely certain that no-one ever read in silence in the ancient world ? (Not that I think we should do so.)
That most of us (in schools and among teachers) have lost the appreciation for poetry aloud is præcisely the reason that poetry has suffered so terribly the past century.
Has it suffered so terribly ? Its sonic values certainly mattered to Pound, Eliot, Bunting, Olson, and Zukofsky. It evidently matters to the poets in Ron Mann’s Poetry In Motion series. And it surely mattered to the poets I heard reciting when I studied at BGSU (I attended a series organized by Howard McCord and populated by poets such as Ted Hughes and Clayton Eshleman, very lively stuff).
Verse doesn’t matter to modern poets because there is no living sound they ever exspect to be applied to their words. It’s really a tragic ignorance.
Some of Elliott Carter’s later works set poetry by John Ashberry, Robert Lowell, and John Hollander. Carter is very sensitive to the sonic value of poetry, I think he would disagree with your assertion (but agree with your conclusion). Btw, he used a variety of Greek texts in his “Syringa”, I understand that he did quite a thorough study of the originals.
Alas, I’m so far removed from any modern poets that I have no idea what the performance scene is like now. But it was pretty lively when I lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s.
And then there’s rap, which I consider a performance poetry. At their best, Tupac, Dre, and Eminem are wordsmiths extraordinaire. Recently I read some Zukofsky that read exactly like the rappers, very slick stuff. I wonder what he would have thought of rap. Yes, I know they can be rude and crude, but they’re not much ruder or cruder than Catullus.
I know, I know, I’m a weird guy.
I once heard someone say they liked reading Shakespeare silently rather than hearing it — I gasped audibly.
Considering how badly he was presented when I was a student, I’m not overly surprised. “Beaten with Shakespeare” was one way we put it. A trip to Stratford (Canada) in the 70s really switched me, actually seeing the plays in full production mode was a tremendous incentive.
Well, I’ve got 'way off-topic, sorry about that. It’ll never happen again, I promise.
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