Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

i have to say i've been so stimulated by an international gathering of
phonologists and metricists working on generative metrics in their own
specialties. it was interesting that my session had classical romance
metres, french and italian, that organized pentameters somewhat as i
posited for hebrew.

the idea in generative metrics is that you bootstrap ideal meters from the
language's prosody, or at least use a generative system to capture the
majority pattern. then you explain deviation from ideal patterns in
various ways: this is the notion of "complexity" in scanning.

i thought you all might be interested in the ideal pentameter: there are
several in jonah 2, strategically placed as i argued.

             I                I         intonational phrases = pause =
           /   \              |                 =caesuras
        P         P           P         phonological phrases
      /   \       |         /   \
   F        F     F       F       F     metrical feet = iambs = words
  /\       /|    /\      /|      /|
 x  x     x x   x  x    x x     x x     metrically scanned syllables
 |  |     | |   |  |    | |     | |
 s  s s   s s   s  s s  s s  s  s s     syllables
 |  | |   | |   |  | |  | |  |  | |
mibbeten $e'ol $iwwati $ama`ta qoli

this is the ideal, a 3+2 pentameter. the burden of my talk was not the
trivial observation of regular beats, but the prosodic organization and
how that relates to the poetic system of accents.

there should be published proceedings, but i would like to get out a full
analysis that includes alliteration, and crucially the mapping and use of
syntactic structures: what i want to show is that o'connor is partly
right: there are syntactic regularities, but they're really explained as
prosody not syntax.

off for turkey at inlaws. wishing you all a good thanksgiving.
V
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Last night we couldn't even find a sleeping bag for a woman. Now we are
looking at collecting cardboard for the homeless...
--Cathy Crowe, street nurse, Toronto Disaster Relief Committee