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Look up synchysis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Synchysis is a rhetorical technique wherein words are intentionally scattered to create bewilderment, or for some other purpose. [1] [2] By disrupting the normal course of a sentence, it forces the audience to consider the meaning of the words and the relationship between them. [3]
This poetry form was a favorite with Latin poets. It is described by the website Silva Rhetoricae as "Hyperbaton or anastrophe taken to an obscuring extreme, either accidentally or purposefully." [4] It is doubtful, however, whether it could be correct to describe effects in Latin poetry, which was very carefully written, as accidental.[ citation needed ]
Synchysis may be opposed to chiasmus, which is a phrase in the form A-B-B-A, either in the same line or in two consecutive lines.[ clarification needed ][ citation needed ]
A line of Latin verse in the form adjective A - adjective B - verb - noun A - noun B, with the verb in the center (or a corresponding chiastic line, again with the verb in the center), is known as a golden line. A highly common occurrence in Virgil's Aeneid, [5] an example is aurea purpuream subnectit fibula vestem, "a golden clasp bound her purple cloak" (Virgil, Aeneid 4.139). Usually, synchysis is formed through the adjective A - adjective B - noun A - noun B structure, but it can also exist as adjective-noun-adjective-noun. [6]
Today, it is mainly found in poetry, [7] where poets use it to maintain metre or rhyme. [8]
Catullus notably made use of synchysis in his poetry. Catullus 75 has this line:
Taking mea with Lesbia this line reads:
The correct way to translate the line, however, is to take it with the more distant mens, observing Catullus's synchysis:
Another example comes from Horace (Odes I.35, lines 5ff.), part of a hymn to a goddess:
The meaning is "thee, (the mistress) of the countryside, the poor farmer beseeches with anxious prayer, thee, the mistress of the ocean, whoever provokes the Carpathian sea in a Tyrrhenian boat (beseeches)", dominam being understood with ruris as well as aequoris. Often, through failure to spot the synchysis, ruris is taken with colonus, and the verse is incorrectly translated as "the poor farmer of the countryside".
Gaius Valerius Catullus, often referred to simply as Catullus, was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote chiefly in the neoteric style of poetry, focusing on personal life rather than classical heroes. His surviving works are still read widely and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.
Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme frequently used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The scheme of the hexameter is usually as follows :
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars consider his authorship of these poems to be dubious.
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced “firs’ light” Many other terms are used to refer to specific cases where sounds are omitted.
Hyperbaton, in its original meaning, is a figure of speech in which a phrase is made discontinuous by the insertion of other words. In modern usage, the term is also used more generally for figures of speech that transpose sentences' natural word order, and it is also called anastrophe.
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. The inflections are often changes in the ending of a word, but can be more complicated, especially with verbs.
Anastrophe is a figure of speech in which the normal word order of the subject, the verb, and the object is changed.
A spondee is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables, as determined by syllable weight in classical meters, or two stressed syllables in modern meters. The word comes from the Greek σπονδή, spondḗ, 'libation'.
In rhetoric, zeugma and syllepsis are figures of speech in which a single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence.
Hendiadys is a figure of speech used for emphasis—"The substitution of a conjunction for a subordination". The basic idea is to use two words linked by the conjunction "and" instead of the one modifying the other. English names for hendiadys include two for one and figure of twins. Although the underlying Greek phrase is ἓν διὰ δυοῖν, '''one through two''', the only other forms occasionally found in English are '''hendiaduo''' and '''hendiaduous''', the latter of which the 17th-century English Biblical commentator Matthew Poole used in his commentary on Genesis 3:16, Proverbs 1:6, and Isaiah 19:20.
Catullus 2 is a poem by Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) that describes the affectionate relationship between an unnamed puella ('girl', possibly Catullus' lover, Lesbia), and her pet sparrow. As scholar and poet John Swinnerton Phillimore has noted, "The charm of this poem, blurred as it is by a corrupt manuscript tradition, has made it one of the most famous in Catullus' book." The meter of this poem is hendecasyllabic, a common form in Catullus' poetry.
Parallelism is a rhetorical device that compounds words or phrases that have equivalent meanings so as to create a definite pattern. This structure is particularly effective when "specifying or enumerating pairs or series of like things". A scheme of balance, parallelism represents "one of the basic principles of grammar and rhetoric".
Latin obscenity is the profane, indecent, or impolite vocabulary of Latin, and its uses. Words deemed obscene were described as obsc(a)ena, or improba. Documented obscenities occurred rarely in classical Latin literature, limited to certain types of writing such as epigrams, but they are commonly used in the graffiti written on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Among the documents of interest in this area is a letter written by Cicero in 45 BC to a friend called Paetus, in which he alludes to a number of obscene words without actually naming them.
Catullus 5 is a passionate ode to Lesbia and one of the most famous poems by Catullus. The poem encourages lovers to scorn the snide comments of others, and to live only for each other, since life is brief and death brings a night of perpetual sleep. This poem has been translated and imitated many times.
The golden line is a type of Latin dactylic hexameter frequently mentioned in Latin classrooms and in contemporary scholarship about Latin poetry, but which apparently began as a verse-composition exercise in schools in early modern Britain.
Catullus 16 or Carmen 16 is a poem by Gaius Valerius Catullus. The poem, written in a hendecasyllabic (11-syllable) meter, was considered to be so sexually explicit following its rediscovery in the following centuries that a full English translation was not published until the 20th century. The first line, Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō, sometimes used as a title, has been called "one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin—or in any other language".
Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.
Latin syntax is the part of Latin grammar that covers such matters as word order, the use of cases, tenses and moods, and the construction of simple and compound sentences, also known as periods.
Latin word order is relatively free. The subject, object, and verb can come in any order, and an adjective can go before or after its noun, as can a genitive such as hostium "of the enemies". A common feature of Latin is hyperbaton, in which a phrase is split up by other words: Sextus est Tarquinius "it is Sextus Tarquinius".
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