![]() (The real number of lines with a dactylic fourth foot will be slightly higher.) These figures give a total of about 18,896 eligible lines. ![]() So about 70–71% of Homeric lines have a dactylic fourth foot. Scanned lines, % (calculated as proportion of sum of all reported figures)ĭactylic fourth foot, % of full corpus (sum of reported figures)ĭactylic fourth foot, % of lines scanned (calculated)ĭactylic fourth foot, actual (calculated) Unscanned lines, % of full corpus (reported) Their figures indicate the following (Schoisswohl and Papakitsos 2020: 170–171):įull corpus, including unscanned lines (reported) Schoisswohl’s and Papakitsos’ tool Dactylo is able to perform automated scansion of over 96% of all Homeric lines. How many lines have a dactylic fourth foot? Oswald (2014: 421) claims that it’s ‘19 out of 20’ lines, but that’s just wildly wrong: a glance at the text of Homer will show that. It isn’t really necessary, but fine, let’s do that. Should we stipulate that our sample space should be confined to those lines? Is that a fair claim, though? After all, a violation can only ever happen in lines with a dactylic fourth foot. (b) Monosyllabic words, including enclitics, don’t cause a violation. The definitions adopted below are, briefly: (a) A bridge is mid-prosodic unit, rather than mid-word. The sample spaceĪccording to the definitions I’ll adopt below, there are fourteen violations of Hermann’s Bridge in Homer. Caesuras happen because prosodic units have typical rhythms bridges happen because there are some rhythms that prosodic units just don’t use. It isn’t any more ‘advanced’ than the mid-line caesura, it’s exactly the same kind of phenomenon. What it is, is an absolutely central feature of the Homeric hexameter. Does that sound like a lot? Well, over 99.94% of lines observe Hermann’s Bridge. ![]() Hermann’s Bridge is by far the strictest of its kind.ĩ8% of Homeric lines have a word break in the third foot. This particular bridge was observed over 200 years ago by Gottfried Hermann (1805: 692–693). A bridge is any position in a poetic rhythm where word break doesn’t usually happen. ![]()
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