Re: Morae (was: Re: Lurkers, poetic forms)

At 11:30 pm -0500 7/5/00, Ed Heil wrote:
>Ray:
>
>In reading Latin verse I have noticed the 'contrapuntal effects' you
>mention and find them fascinating.  They're what makes the verse
>interesting.
I agree - without this effect, the verses would become very mechanical.
And with the little I investigated in Catullus suggested to me that the
Roman authors were well aware of the efffect & exploited it.

[snip]
>
>I found the apparently random position of pitch-accents in the verses
>to be extremely bizarre and disorienting, being used to the Latin
>hexameters, where, as you say, the stress-accents tend to dance
>cleverly in and out of the ictus.
I think part of the trouble for us with ancient Greek is that we are unused
to pitch accent and probably concentrate too much when trying to reproduce
it; this artificial effort is likely, I guess, 'disorientate' us & make us
forget the verse rhythm.  With the Greeks to whom pitch accent was, so to
speak, seconf nature, there was not this problem.

>It was for that reason that I found Allen's idea about a "secondary
>stress accent" which informed Greek poetry kind of convincing, though,
I have no problem with the concept of a "secondary stress accent" - indeed,
I think the verse rhythms must have grown out of the rhythms of common
speech.  Where I part company with Allen is his theory that it was a
secondary _word_ stress accent.  I find that difficult to accept,
especially as the word stress we now have in modern Greek was developed
from the old pitch accent & shows no trace of Allen's secondary word stress.

In my own mind, I'm sure the "secondary stress accent" was a phrasal
phenomenon.  It is something, I'd like to follow up if I had the time &
resources to do the necessary research.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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