Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter or rhythmic scheme in poetry. It is traditionally associated with the quantitative meter of classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin and was consequently considered to be the grand style of Western classical poetry. Some premier examples of its use are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Hexameters also form part of elegiac poetry in both languages, alternating with dactylic pentameters.
In poetry, metre (British) or meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.
A mora is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. The definition of a mora varies. In 1968, American linguist James D. McCawley defined it as "something of which a long syllable consists of two and a short syllable consists of one". The term comes from the Latin word for "linger, delay", which was also used to translate the Greek word chronos (time) in its metrical sense.
The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. The foot might be compared to a bar in musical notation.
In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. The Old English epic Beowulf, as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German Muspilli, the Old Saxon Heliand, the Old Norse Poetic Edda, and many Middle English poems such as Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Alliterative Morte Arthur all use alliterative verse.
Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role — or no role at all — in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as Japanese or modern French or Finnish — as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English, in which accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse are more common.
In phonology, syncope is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel. It is found both in synchronic analysis of languages and diachronics. Its opposite, whereby sounds are added, is epenthesis.
A dactyl is a foot in poetic meter. In quantitative verse, often used in Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight. In accentual verse, often used in English, it is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables—the opposite is the anapaest.
In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical Indo-European verse, as developed in Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin, distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to the meter of the line.
Scansion, or a system of scansion, is the method or practice of determining and (usually) graphically representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse. In classical poetry, these patterns are based on the different lengths of each syllable, and in English poetry, they are based on the different levels of stress placed on each syllable. In both cases, the meter often has a regular foot. Over the years, many different systems have been established to mark the scansion of a poem.
Iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" refers to the type of foot used, here the iamb, which in English indicates an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. "Pentameter" indicates a line of five "feet".
In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels, which are related to changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word, and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.
Quantitative metathesis is a specific form of metathesis or transposition involving quantity or vowel length. By this process, two vowels near each other – one long, one short – switch their lengths, so that the long one becomes short, and the short one becomes long.
In Ancient Greek grammar, movable nu, movable N or ephelcystic nu is a letter nu placed on the end of some grammatical forms in Attic or Ionic Greek. It is used to avoid two vowels in a row (hiatus) and to create a long syllable in poetic meter.
Ancient Greek phonology is the description of the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek. This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier. The pronunciation of Ancient Greek is not known from direct observation, but determined from other types of evidence. Some details regarding the pronunciation of Attic Greek and other Ancient Greek dialects are unknown, but it is generally agreed that Attic Greek had certain features not present in English or Modern Greek, such as a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; a distinction between single and double consonants and short and long vowels in most positions in a word; and a word accent that involved pitch.
Robert Bridges' theory of elision is a theory of elision developed by the poet Robert Bridges, while he was working on a prosodic analysis of John Milton's poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Bridges describes his theory in thorough detail in his 1921 book Milton's Prosody. With his definition of poetic elision, Bridges is able to demonstrate that no line in Paradise Lost contains an extra unmetrical syllable mid-line; that is, any apparent extra mid-line syllable can be explained as an example of Bridges' elision.
In his book Milton's Prosody, Robert Bridges undertakes a detailed analysis of the prosody of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Bridges shows that there are no lines in Paradise Lost with fewer than ten syllables, and furthermore, that with a suitable definition of elision, there are no mid-line extra-metrical syllables. He also demonstrates that the stresses may fall at any point in the line, and that although most lines have the standard five stresses, there are examples of lines with only three and four stresses. All this amounts to a statement that Milton was writing a form of Syllabic verse. Bridges explains this in historical terms by observing that Milton followed the practice of Geoffrey Chaucer, who — in Bridges' view — adopted the Romance prosody of French verse, which was syllabic, having itself derived from the practice of Latin poets who through a corruption of Greek quantitative meters also counted syllables. Bridges notes that the approach Milton takes in Paradise Lost represents a certain tightening of the rules, compared to his earlier work, such as Comus, in which he allowed himself the Shakespearian 'liberty' of a feminine ending before a caesura.
In Latin and Greek poetry, correption is the shortening of a long vowel at the end of one word before a short vowel at the beginning of the next. Vowels next to each other in neighboring words are in hiatus.
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.
Generative metrics is the collective term for three distinct theories of verse structure advanced between 1966 and 1977. Inspired largely by the example of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) and Chomsky and Morris Halle's Sound Pattern of English (1968), these theories aim principally at the formulation of explicit linguistic rules that will generate all possible well-formed instances of a given meter and exclude any that are not well-formed. T.V.F. Brogan notes that of the three theories, "[a]ll three have undergone major revision, so that each exists in two versions, the revised version being preferable to the original in every case."
