<< message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura >> Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 11:11:41 +0100 From: Robert Dyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Dear List, Thus sollicited!! M. Plantade and I have corresponded briefly privately, but that in no way impedes our response to the list. 1. Homer or all of those who wrote parts of the epics (whichever is the best way of looking at epics written squarely IN a tradition) used at least 2 cola (singular colon = limb) to compose one line. You can easily understand how oral poets composed words into metrical cola of the vaious formats that fit into one hexameter. It turns out that writing catalog poetry (lists of place names such as the big one at the end of Iliad II) is very easy if you follow the rules for turning long or short words into cola and fitting cola together into a hexameter line. The same is true for some lyric poems, such as Pindar, also. There is lots of scholarly literature on all this. The question addressed by Eduard Fraenkel was, Did the Roman poets such as Vergil and Horace compose by cola? There is dispute over this. As a loyal student of Fraenkel I believe they did, but Horace not always. Some of Vergil's cola are very interesting from a metrical point of view because Latin has a much stronger word stress than ancient Greek did. Both Vergil and Horace seem conscious of the conflict that arises in most Latin cola (= verse phrases) between their normal spoken word stresses (that MUST be observed in reading Latin poetry if you are not going to have nonsense) and the evident metrical patterns, which do in some poetry represent a musical pattern. Obviously the first person to raise this question on the list had a teacher in former days who read the poetry monotously (ignoring one or other of the underlying patterns, probably the word stress). 2. Here are some things to try. Open your Aeneid and read the last 5 syllables of every line you see in front of you, quickly one after another. If you know Latin word stress you will find the dum-di-di-dum-dum amusing and appalling. The beat of the verse on the first syllable of the fifth and sixth feet of the hexamer coincides with the natural Latin word stress of (normally) two consecutive words. Any hexameter line in Vergil that does not end this way is extraordinary and very interesting. In my terms the coincidence of word stress and metrical pattern at the end of the line is a "resolution" - the conflict in the metrical feet before it is replaced by something easy to read and indicating orally the end of the line. Some lines are full of coincidences and read in a flowing, easy way. Lines that have many different stresses and beats read much more slowly. If you read a long passage observing this difference in the "resolution", as Derek Williams did, the flow of the passage becomes very interesting and far from monotonous. 3. Word order is a much more difficult question and I have never been sure how many people in the word agree with me, my teacher A.F. Wells, and his teacher Cyril Bailey (best known for the best edition of Lucretius). Latin has two systems in the clause, the sentence and the paragraph. One is the one we all learned at school and my twelve-year-old is being examined on in school as I write this (we spent last night revising). The four basic rules of Latin syntax are: Agreement a. The verb agrees with its subject; b. The adjective agrees with the noun it modifies. Governance c. The verb governs the case of its abject. d. The preposition governs its noun. Vergil must obey these rules to write Latin. But he and Horace use them in a sophisticated way to write Latin in a word order without any great logical organization but rather a word order dictated by metre and by a sort of painting which juxtaposes words to create visual or other associative images. In doing this they may well have seemed as shocking as Ezra Pound or James Joyce. I don't know. But their adjectives are often far from the nouns they agree with, verbs from subjects and objects. They also exploit the rules that a genitive noun goes with the nearest possible noun (Horace loves putting a genitive halfway between two possible nouns, creating ambiguity or rather a double use of one word) and that an adverb or adverbial phrase goes with the nearest possible verb. 4. Now let me stress something that you find rarely or never (please tell me places where it is written up, Maurice Cunningham and people in U.Kentucky have published and spoken on aspects of word order rules, but never synthetically, I believe - I cannot be the only heir of Wells and Bailey alive) in textbooks. LATIN DOES HAVE WORD ORDER RULES, not only in classical prose but in poets such as Catullus and Ovid. Therefore Latin, alongside the Tagalog and Caucasian families of languages, did have two dimensions of syntax (the grammar of agreement and governance and the logic of word order, beautifully taught in French schools but as a logic rather than a feature of syntax). It would take the book that Wells always planned to write and hoped in vain I would write to give all the rules but here is the gist. The unit begins with that which relates it to the preceding unit - the relative pronoun, a word for "he", the person or thing that speaker and hearer both know about. It ends with the word that conveys the message of the speaker, often a verb to express the relationship asserted by the speaker between the nouns and pronouns grouped before it. A surprising subject, object or adjective asserted by the speaker may come last in the sentence or clause as his special observation about the words in the middle of the sentence. These rules also determine the structure of the paragraph, from the well-known and obvious to the speaker's message. I do not know much about Chinese grammar, but it is my general impression that the grammatical rules of word order in the Chinese sentence are very similar to the "logical" rules of Latin word order. 6. I love the way Catullus, Ovid and Tacitus use the rules of word order to great effect, and Tacitus seems to follow both normal rules and Vergil's talent for painting with words. I know only one Latin writer who shows no trace of the Latin word order rules that Bailey, Wells and I have always taught. His name is Vergil. Pardon a long post, but I will be startled if it meets with general agreement. Rob Dyer in retirement in Paris, bringing up three young sons and listening to my wife's ideas on why Proust's big novel was unfinished, as she becomes the bête noire of the world's experts. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
