Metrici Gratia
It's Foreign Language Days today. The University (or, the Modern and Classical Languages Department of the College of Arts and Sciences) invites all of the high schools in the state to come and visit foreign language classes once a year. So I have to behave well and sound particularly snazzy when scanning my line of Virgil aloud today. I hate trying to read Latin in meter.
Ridiculously complex set of rules to determine a long/versus short syllable ... involving doubled consonants, and some consonants are a single letter but count double because you make more than one sound saying them, but other consonantal sounds, liquids and possibly a nasal or so, when they come after a 'hard stop' (whatever the heck that is, neither my textbook nor my instructor has given me a conclusive answer on that score yet) don't actually count ...
Greek is much easier because (at least) there are four vowels which are long or short by nature. Latin has no such things. Every vowel (a, e, i, o, u and the pesky Greek 'y') has the potential to be either short or long ... except that some words have long-by-nature vowels in them ... and if any of my instructors before Jim had been even remotely persnickety about vowel pronunciation which was not meaning-making (hardly ever more than one vowel per word which matters and not always even that much), I might have a bat's chance in hell of getting my lines right once in a while. I'm mostly to a point where I can make the metrics work out on paper by process of elimination, but it doesn't seem to mater how dramatically I draw such things, some words just don't want to be read aloud 'correctly'. And Jim insists that there is only one correct way to read a line of Virgil. "So I don't understand how you can have scanned that more than one way, De Milo." *Irritated Sigh*
In other news: Got the Petronius exam back last night. In the borderlands between A and -A. Plenty happy with that. *Bull From the Sea* finally started to pick up a smidgen of speed, which means I might hang with it a few more days before switching to something else (again). I have to be at work earlyish today because, apparently, everybody and their dog who uses testing accommodations through DSS has a midterm. I guess we've kicked some staff out of their offices to have more room for test-takers who need scribes, readers, or just extended time. Good times. Wrote 150ish new words on Fail last night.
End of news. Gripe off. Going to put my people-face on.
Ridiculously complex set of rules to determine a long/versus short syllable ... involving doubled consonants, and some consonants are a single letter but count double because you make more than one sound saying them, but other consonantal sounds, liquids and possibly a nasal or so, when they come after a 'hard stop' (whatever the heck that is, neither my textbook nor my instructor has given me a conclusive answer on that score yet) don't actually count ...
Greek is much easier because (at least) there are four vowels which are long or short by nature. Latin has no such things. Every vowel (a, e, i, o, u and the pesky Greek 'y') has the potential to be either short or long ... except that some words have long-by-nature vowels in them ... and if any of my instructors before Jim had been even remotely persnickety about vowel pronunciation which was not meaning-making (hardly ever more than one vowel per word which matters and not always even that much), I might have a bat's chance in hell of getting my lines right once in a while. I'm mostly to a point where I can make the metrics work out on paper by process of elimination, but it doesn't seem to mater how dramatically I draw such things, some words just don't want to be read aloud 'correctly'. And Jim insists that there is only one correct way to read a line of Virgil. "So I don't understand how you can have scanned that more than one way, De Milo." *Irritated Sigh*
In other news: Got the Petronius exam back last night. In the borderlands between A and -A. Plenty happy with that. *Bull From the Sea* finally started to pick up a smidgen of speed, which means I might hang with it a few more days before switching to something else (again). I have to be at work earlyish today because, apparently, everybody and their dog who uses testing accommodations through DSS has a midterm. I guess we've kicked some staff out of their offices to have more room for test-takers who need scribes, readers, or just extended time. Good times. Wrote 150ish new words on Fail last night.
End of news. Gripe off. Going to put my people-face on.