long marks
In the ancient indo-european languages, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, vowels occur in long and short forms. Thus the sound of the languages when spoken has a rhythmic quality. The study of this is called metrics.
An awareness of meter is most important when one is studying poetry. The meter a poet chooses for any given poem will often indicate something about its mood and overall style. It's also important to understand the meter so one pronounces the poem correctly--though if editors would simply mark the vowels in Latin texts as long or not a student doesn't need to scan to pronounce it correctly (long vowels in Greek and Sanskrit and more transparent because of their different scripts). Although I was able to understand meter in Greek effortlessly, and my pronunciation of Sanskrit was complimented by my then professor (who moonlighted as a trained singer) when I was studying it, my understanding of Latin long and short vowels has, until this year, been pretty poor. I was always a prose specialist in Latin, and it didn't seem all that important.
And then I taught poetry this year. It turns out, Latin metrics are pretty cool too, and not as difficult as I'd been led to believe them to be. Also, Latin poetry is pretty cool. Throw some Dactylic Hexameter,
- uu / - uu / - uu / - uu / - uu / - x
Hendecasyllables, or
xx-uu-u-u-x
Elegiac Couplets
- uu / - uu / - uu / - uu / - uu / - x
- uu / - uu / - // - uu / - uu / xmy way, and I'll make short work of them. It's also given me a very natural sense of where long marks occur in Latin--a total bonus. ^__^
The point of all this is, I gave my 30 10th graders a project. They had to pick a short poem or passage of poetry at least 12 lines long. They had to scan it, and over the past week I've corrected and/or worked independently with them to get it right. Over this April break, they'll be making posters showing the scansion of their poems, highlighting five points where the poet shows rhetorical flourishes, and then providing an interesting and modern transation of the poem. In about a week and a half they'll recite their poem from memory for the class. I'm very interested to see what they come up with.
An awareness of meter is most important when one is studying poetry. The meter a poet chooses for any given poem will often indicate something about its mood and overall style. It's also important to understand the meter so one pronounces the poem correctly--though if editors would simply mark the vowels in Latin texts as long or not a student doesn't need to scan to pronounce it correctly (long vowels in Greek and Sanskrit and more transparent because of their different scripts). Although I was able to understand meter in Greek effortlessly, and my pronunciation of Sanskrit was complimented by my then professor (who moonlighted as a trained singer) when I was studying it, my understanding of Latin long and short vowels has, until this year, been pretty poor. I was always a prose specialist in Latin, and it didn't seem all that important.
And then I taught poetry this year. It turns out, Latin metrics are pretty cool too, and not as difficult as I'd been led to believe them to be. Also, Latin poetry is pretty cool. Throw some Dactylic Hexameter,
- uu / - uu / - uu / - uu / - uu / - x
Hendecasyllables, or
xx-uu-u-u-x
Elegiac Couplets
- uu / - uu / - uu / - uu / - uu / - x
- uu / - uu / - // - uu / - uu / xmy way, and I'll make short work of them. It's also given me a very natural sense of where long marks occur in Latin--a total bonus. ^__^
The point of all this is, I gave my 30 10th graders a project. They had to pick a short poem or passage of poetry at least 12 lines long. They had to scan it, and over the past week I've corrected and/or worked independently with them to get it right. Over this April break, they'll be making posters showing the scansion of their poems, highlighting five points where the poet shows rhetorical flourishes, and then providing an interesting and modern transation of the poem. In about a week and a half they'll recite their poem from memory for the class. I'm very interested to see what they come up with.