Biblical Hebrew Forum

[decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca (Vincent DeCaen)]

any of you folks out there into biblical poetry?

there's an international conference here on generative phonology and
poetic metrics. i'm giving a paper on the jonah pentameter. rather
trivial, except that there's not supposed to be a meter. i'm working on
the theory of the surfacing of the unmarked, which in this case is 3+2.

what i'm struck by is the ubiquity of the meter in late hebrew. also, the
infamous qinah of lamentations: 3+2

what i think will prove a breakthrough is using the tiberian prosodics,
accents, phrasing, secondary stress, etc, as a guide to footing. when you
understand that many words carry two stresses, then things fall rapidly
into line.

a glaring example: watson, classical hebrew poetry, p. 99

        HCYLNY M)YBY )LHY, MMTQWMMY T$GBNY    (ps.59:2)

watson says this ought to be 3+3, but there's a hidden beat in what he
analyzes initially as 3+2. but of course it's 3+3, look at MMTQWMMY,
there's no mystery where the extra beat is coming from! <sigh> so it goes. 

anybody see something within the last year or two on hebrew metre?

cheers
V 
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Dr Vincent DeCaen     <decaen AT chass.utoronto.ca>
c/o Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, 4 Bancroft Ave., 2d floor
University of Toronto, Toronto ON, CANADA, M5S 1A1

Hebrew Syntax Encoding Initiative, www.chass.utoronto.ca/~decaen/hsei/
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