But very rarely! It may be assumed that in the lines you'll be expected to scan, the second to last foot is a dactyl.) So let's go back to our line: (Once in a blue moon, it will be a spondee. It is similar for the second to last foot in the line: it is very nearly always a dactyl. On tests like the one you'll be taking, the testmakers rarely pull something like that. Sometimes, it is a trochee (one long and one short), but just assume it is a spondee. The final two syllables in a line will usually be a spondee. God Himself): "A syllable is long only if it contains a long vowel or a diphthong or if the vowel, though itself short, is followed by two or more consonants (except where the second of the two consonants is "h," including the aspirates ch, ph, and th, or where the only two consonants are qu or, sometimes a "stop," especially b, c, d, g, p, or t, followed by one of the "liquids," l or r)." It is Vergil's Aeneid edited by Richard LaFleur (aka. To conclude long vowels a little more extensively and explain a little more (the non review stuff is italicised), here is an excerpt from the introduction to A Song of War. The "au" sound is the only diphthong in this line. Diphthongs are always long! So in the line we're scanning. In English, the "ou" is a diphthong, like it is in the word "sound." (The flip side of that would be like in the world "diet." Each vowel has a different sound.) In Latin, the diphthongs are. Diphthongs are two vowels that are pronounced as a single sound. Go ahead and mark these syllables off right away. Because of the two (or more) consonants, the vowel will be long. Okay, when you go to scan a line, first look to see if there are any consonants next to each other with a vowel directly proceeding it. A dactyl is marked by _ U U again, with each mark over each respective syllable. A dactyl is a long beat, followed by two short beats, called breves. Therefore, a spondee is marked by two macrons: _ _ with each line over each long beat. Hexameter means "6 measures." A measure (or foot) in this meter is either a dactyl or a spondee. I am a 6th year latin student, also taking Vergil this year, so we're in the same boat.)įirst of all, the entire Aeneid is dactylic hexameter. (I don't know how much you know, so I'll start right from the beginning. Okay, first of all, scansion is not hard! You can do it! I'm surprised you haven't learned it yet.
Before anything else, you should check for elisions :P. So I need to know rules for syllable length by nature, not just placement, but it's okay I've got that covered in the Gould and Whiteley text. The exam is designed to be challenging so they could put hypermetric elision on it if they wanted. Final trochees are pretty common in Book VI, coming up at least every six lines or so. Do you know how I can tell which syllables are stressed? I remember seeing a list of rules once but I can't find it in my folder.Īlso, I can't assume the last foot will be a spondee and not a trochee. The exam covers all literary and metrical devices so I need to be able to talk about coincidence of accent and ictus and how the sound effects contribute to the meaning et cetera. The thing I'm having the most trouble with is stress. Thanks heaps for your help, but I've basically got quantity down. Does anyone have a list of rules on how Latin words are stressed?Įdit - Found a page on rules for quantity, elision, and most importantly, stress. I'm sorry if I've misused terms here any help will be very much appreciated.Įdit - Thanks everyone for your help, but my main problem is stress rather than quantity. (I'm in my final year of secondary school and these exams are roughly equivalent to HSC or IB or SAT or A-levels or whatever bureaucrats in your country call matriculation - probably a bit easier than IB, actually.) The editions I'm using are Keith MacLennan's, and Gould & Whiteley's, as well as a Collins dictionary - all have sections on scansion but they're not very helpful on stress.
The exam is in less than forty-eight hours so I'm freaking out about my inability to distinguish between trochees and spondees and going hysterical at hypermetric elision. Could anyone refer me to a good and simple online guide to scansion of dactylic hexameter? I'm mostly alright with quantity (except for last syllables of lines) but quite inept with stress/accent/ictus/etc.Ĭontext, should you care: The text I'm studying is Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, upon which half my VCE Latin exam is based.
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