What Is Prosody?:
Prosody is a technical term used in linguistics and poetry to describe the patterns, rhythms or meters of a language. Prosody can refer to the rules for the pronunciation of a language as well as its versification. Correct pronunciation of words includes enunciation, as well as proper accenting and making sure each syllable has its required length.
Syllable Length:
Syllable length doesn't seem terribly important for pronunciation in English. Take a word like "laboratory." It appears to have 5 syllables, but when someone from the U.S. or U.K. pronounces it, there are only 4. Oddly, the 4 syllables aren't the same. Americans stress the first syllable. We hold it an extra "time". The Latin for time is "tempus" and the word for the duration of time, especially in linguistics, is "mora." Two short syllables or "morae" count for one long syllable. Latin and Greek have rules about whether a given syllable is long or short. More than in English, length is very important.
Why Do You Need to Know About Prosody?:
Whenever you read ancient Greek or Latin poetry you are reading the writing of a man or woman who has replaced the mundane with the loftier speech of poetry. Part of the flavor of the poetry is conveyed by the tempo of the words. To read the poetry woodenly without trying to grasp the tempo would be like reading sheet music without playing it even mentally. If such an artistic rationale doesn't motivate you to try to learn about Greek and Roman meter, how's this? Understanding the meter will help you to translate.
Foot:
A foot is a unit of meter in poetry. A foot will usually have 2, 3 or 4 syllables in Greek and Latin poetry. A foot composed of two short syllables is called pyrrhic. Such a foot would have two times or morae. A foot with 2 long syllables is called a spondee. It would have 4 morae. A trochee is a long syllable followed by a short and an iam(b) is a short syllable followed by a long. Both of these have 3 morae.
Uncommon feet can have 8 morae like the dispondee, and there are special, long patterned ones, like the Sapphic.
- Quick Review Question: What's the minimum conceivable number of morae in a foot?
Trisyllabic Feet:
There are 8 possible feet based on three syllables. The two most common are the dactyl, which is named visually for the finger, (long, short, short) and the anapest (short, short, long).
Feet of four or more syllables are compound feet.Verse:
A verse is a line of poetry using feet according to a specified pattern or meter. A meter can refer to a single foot in a verse. If you have a verse made up of dactyls, each dactyl is a meter. A meter is not always a single foot. For instance, in a line of imabic trimeter, each meter or metron (pl. metra or metrons) consists of two feet.
Dactylic Hexameter:
If the meter is dactyl, with 6 meters in the verse, you have a line of dactylic hexameter. If there are only five meters, it is pentameter. Dactylic hexameter is the meter that was used in epic poetry or heroic poetry.
There is one additional important bit of confusing information: the meter used in dactylic hexameter can be either dactyl (long, short, short) or spondee (long, long). Why? They have the same number of morae.
