In this blog I want to talk a bit about meter in Latin and Persian. Both are Indo-European languages and the poetry of each is based on long and short syllables. What fascinates me is the intricate dance of consonants and vowels in determining syllable length in poetry.
To discuss syllable length, it is easiest to start by discussing long vowels. A long vowel (indicated here by a macron ¯ ) makes a syllable long as in these Latin words followed by Persian words of the same meaning.
tū / tō (تو)
māter / mādar (مادر)
frāter / berādar(برادر)
pēs / pā (پا)
vōx / āvāz (آواز)
nāvis / nāv (ناو)
Short vowels, of course, make a syllable short as in
ne / na (نه)
It would be wonderful if things were this easy. Unfortunately, they are not. Yes, the syllable -ter in māter is a short, but the -dar in mādar is long! And in a phrase such as
māter tua / mādar-e tō (مادرِ تو)
the Latin -ter becomes long while the Persian -dar becomes short. What the bleep? You might ask?
It turns out that length is largely controlled by consonants. In Persian, one consonant following a short vowel is all it takes to make a syllable long. Not so in Latin. It takes two consonants: māter tua. Somehow, the Roman ear needed a bit more coaxing. Perhaps final consonants were weaker in Latin than they are in Persian. Maybe this weakness contributed to subsequent sound changes that produced the Romance languages we have today.
But this hold that the consonants have on short vowels can be broken. In Persian, if a vowel follows a consonant it forms a new syllable and the preceding syllable becomes short. Thus, mādar-e tō becomes metrically:
mā da re tō:
long-short-short long.
Similarly, in Latin, if you want to make the -ter in māter tua short again, all you have to do is use a vowel to separate the consonant mash-up. For example, māter alma tua becomes metrically
mā ter al ma tu a
long-short long-short short-short
There is one more thing to say about consonants and this concerns only Persian:. If a long vowel is followed by one or more consonants in the same word or a short vowel is followed by two consonants in the same word, the syllable becomes really long. In fact, such a syllable is called ‘overlong.’
rectus / rāst (راست)
est / ast (است)
Some say that rāst and ast become so long that it is as if one said rāste or aste.
Even though the above rule applies only to Persian, isn't this a bit like the consonant mash-up in Latin? Don't the two consonants in the Persian ast have about the same effect on the meter as the two consonants in mater tua? Don't they both make the syllable really long? (Two or more consonants do occur in Latin words. Take estis, for example, which is long-short. The Persian counterpart is astīd, which is short-short for the reason explained above).
There is a lot more to learn about meter in both languages but nothing that surprising. Both languages account for variation and wrestle with final nasal consonants. Both avail themselves of elision, and both make use of enjambement and both play around with word boundaries. All I wanted to share in this blog post was that it is the consonant that leads in the metric dance.
The great polymath and linguist Sir William Jones wrote a book in Latin about Asiatic meter. It's worth looking at through Hathi Trust. He discusses meter in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and other languages. Being classically-trained, he brings a well-rounded outlook to the discussion. Here is a sample page with the famous line from the Persian poet Hafez::: with his translation in Latin and mine in English below that. Included too is a transliteration and scansion of the lines--
اگر آن ترک شیرازی بدست آرد دل مراagar ān tork-e shīrāzī bedast ārad del-e marā ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ si Turca Shirazius manu suā cor meum acciperet, If that Shirazi Turk falls in love with me,
بخال هندویش بخشم سمرقند و بخاراراbekhāl-e hendūyash bakhsham samarqand o bokhārārā ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ¯ Naevo illius nigro darem urbes Bockharam et Samarcandam...For that Hindu mole I'll give Samarkand and Bokhara..
