Comments - A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO THE READING OF LATIN PROSE AND POETRY. - eLatin eGreek eLearn2024-03-29T08:28:20Zhttps://eclassics.ning.com/profiles/comment/feed?attachedTo=727885%3ABlogPost%3A4545&xn_auth=noThanks for this, Evan! I thin…tag:eclassics.ning.com,2007-08-25:727885:Comment:46052007-08-25T17:46:30.526ZLaura Gibbshttps://eclassics.ning.com/profile/lauragibbs
Thanks for this, Evan! I think it is also useful to share with students the crisis already faced by non-native Latin speakers in the ancient world who wanted to write poetry as well as the crisis faced by Latin-speaking poets in later antiquity who wanted to imitate classical verse even when the Latin they spoke no longer naturally had vowel length (after all, the Romance languages all lost this distinction - vowels have various qualities in the modern Romance languages, but for all that they…
Thanks for this, Evan! I think it is also useful to share with students the crisis already faced by non-native Latin speakers in the ancient world who wanted to write poetry as well as the crisis faced by Latin-speaking poets in later antiquity who wanted to imitate classical verse even when the Latin they spoke no longer naturally had vowel length (after all, the Romance languages all lost this distinction - vowels have various qualities in the modern Romance languages, but for all that they have varying qualities, prosodic quantity is not one of them).<br />
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So, the wanna-be poets would look to classical poetry to try to learn what the vowel lengths were! Poor guys: they could not just look something up in a dictionary as we can. They faced the same problem we face (not having a clue about vowel length), and unlike us they did not have dictionaries with the vowel lengths all nicely supplied for them.<br />
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So, they would collect lines of poetry which would give them clues about vowel length. Ingenious!<br />
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I always let my students know about this so they can feel FORTUNATE to be able to look up vowel lengths in the dictionary. Just imagine if they had to figure out for themselves the lengths of vowels by poring over lines and lines and lines of Latin poetry looking for clues about vowel length in the meter.