Talk:Greek prosody

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Title of the article[edit]

This article seems to be poorly named, since it says "prosody ... is the theory and practice of versification"; but the article on Prosody (linguistics) gives a totally different definition, namely: "those elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech. These contribute to linguistic functions such as intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm", and says nothing at all about versification. Devine and Stephens, in their major work The Prosody of Greek Speech (1994), use the word in the second meaning. Since this article is really not about prosody but about Greek metre, shouldn't it be renamed Greek metre? Kanjuzi (talk) 17:34, 18 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Dictionaries give earlier senses which tie the word to poetry, as the etymology also suggests. It is a pity that when linguistics sprouted up its practitioners couldn't find a new word for this! Seadowns (talk) 16:38, 2 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I am Yoandri Dominguez! Even if you go back to Greek and Latin grammarians prosody was one thing and metrics/meters was another. Prosody related *properly speaking* to accents (*by extension* to quantity as well) while metrics related to what they called 'rhythm" or numbers. So the title IS wrong. Thank you.

General[edit]

This was a wonderfully brave article to attempt, but there is still quite a lot to do! One prominent fact that might be mentioned is the balancing strophe and antistrophe in certain types of verse. I think this can be called prosody rather than metre.  Seadowns (talk) 11:41, 3 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It is outreageous that this does not link to a greek version of the article[edit]

Please make this either "meter (greek)" or "metrics (greek)", NOT PROSODY. The same goes for the latin article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.57.144.205 (talk) 03:43, 8 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Quantity[edit]

The remarks I made about the corresponding Latin article generally apply here, mutatis mutandis. I will repeat one point, about the doctrine that if a word has a final closed syllable with a short vowel, and the next word in the line begins with a vowel, then the closing consonant is transferred to the beginning of the next word so as to keep the syllable short. This commits us to assuming such transfers would occur across  heavy breaks, such as the start of a new sentence, and even, bizarrely, from one speaker to another. (This last might happen in hemistichomythia. I have no access to texts at present to see if there are instances of it.) It seems to me to be an odd and unnecessary doctrine: why not just say the syllable is short and remains so if followed by a vowel, which I was brought up to think in Greek and Latin?

The statement that the final syllables of lines are always long, even if thy are short open vowels, has a different basis from the statements made about the other syllables. The quantities of the other syllables are determined empirically. If you gave someone the bits of Homer or Euripides quoted in the article as evidence they would be able to work out the verse structure. Working purely empirically, however, they would say the last syllable was anceps, noting, eg, that of the twelve lines of Euripides quoted six, by my count, end in a short. The doctrine that they are always long is based on theory, not on evidence, and I think readers of the article should have the theory explained fully. One implication is that ancient poets, from Homer on, made no attempt at all to comply with this rule of prosody, though complying with the others, with occasional use of licence. (The over-use of licence is mocked in the spoof hexameter quoted by Aristotle in his Poetics. I can't type Greek characters, but in Roman this line reads "Epicharen eidon Marathonade badizonta", with two false quantities. Epichares was apparently a bad poet.) Should not the article explain why the final syllables should not be anceps, as used to be taught? Can anybody do this? Seadowns (talk) 18:13, 31 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]