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What do the red lines mean in the poem below. Are those where you are supposed to pause? I thought there should only be a pause at the end of the line. If you could listen to this speaker recite the poem and tell if she doing it right I would appreciate it. https://librivox.org/ars-poetica-and-carmen-saeculare-by-horace/ Also what is the rule for forming the red lines. And what is there formal name so that I can do more research. The image was generated by pedecerto.

Red Lines

bobsmith76
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    My guess is that it's marking possible caesura, since the program can't choose between them. The dotted line seems to indicate where the potential break would fall between feet rather than within them. I have no idea about the zigzag line. – Kingshorsey Nov 12 '21 at 16:40
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    I am sure everyone has noticed that a macron is here used (wrongly) for short vowels in closed syllables. – fdb Nov 13 '21 at 12:14
  • @fdb Using macrons to indicate the length of a syllable rather than a vowel is yet another thing that I hope to be clarified in a proper documentation. Their notation sure leaves room for improvement, but I chose to focus my answer on just the red marks. – Joonas Ilmavirta Nov 13 '21 at 12:47
  • @fdb, I know. It is extremely upsetting that pedecerto.eu decided to do that. it took me about 2 months in my latin career to figure that out. – bobsmith76 Nov 21 '21 at 01:55

1 Answers1

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That looks like a program trying to guess where to pause within a verse. It seems to identify three kinds of possible pauses:

  • A bucolic diaeresis between the fourth and the fifth foot, indicated by a broken bar.
  • A masculine caesura within a foot, right after the stressed first syllable, indicated by a solid bar.
  • A feminine caesura within a foot, between the two short syllables of a dactyl, indicated by a wiggly line.

The pause notation is not standard by any means (nor is the use of the macron), so any source using them should tell what is meant. I tried to browse the Pedecerto website for details but found none. But all examples I saw support this conclusion. (Thanks cmw and TKR for help in the comments!)

To choose a place to pause when reading a line, pick one or two of the masculine or feminine caesuras for each line that make reading convenient or align with syntactic or semantic boundaries. The pauses in reading a line occur within a foot, not between feet. The suggestions given by the software are a tool to find places to pause, not a definitive list of actual pauses; you need to use your judgement — something the software doesn't have — to choose where to pause in a verse. Each verse in your sample has plenty of options to choose from.

The bucolic diaeresis as an intended pause is rare from what I can tell, and it should be accompanied with a clear pause in sense. My advice is to simply ignore the broken bars entirely when learning to read hexameter.

Joonas Ilmavirta
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  • The broken bar is actually marking when there is a word break after the fourth foot. Additionally, it's only marking the caesura in the second, third, and fourth feet, which explains the lack of bars in other places. – cmw Nov 12 '21 at 21:32
  • @cmw Did you find those details somewhere in a documentation? It seems to me that the broken bar only comes at foot boundaries, but I could of course be misinterpreting the small sample. – Joonas Ilmavirta Nov 12 '21 at 21:46
  • Yes, it comes between feet, but only when the fifth foot starts with a new word. That's why it's there for |pictor | equinam but not in|ducere | plumas. – cmw Nov 12 '21 at 21:49
  • Look at this line: Fḗrrō sḗ | cǣdī́ | quām dī́ctīs : hī́s tŏlĕrā́ret. Dictis starts a new foot, but there's not broken bar before it. – cmw Nov 12 '21 at 21:54
  • (But no, there's no documentation that I could find.) – cmw Nov 12 '21 at 21:54
  • @cmw Good point! I updated my description. I still don't know why they'd indicate a word break between the fourth and the fifth foot with a special symbol, but that's what they seem to be doing. Without documentation it's hard to tell, but I think it's pretty safe to ignore that one for the purpose of finding caesuras. – Joonas Ilmavirta Nov 12 '21 at 21:56
  • The broken bar seems to be marking a bucolic diaeresis (a word break or larger break between the fourth and fifth feet). – TKR Nov 12 '21 at 22:37
  • Let me try to get in touch with the builder of the program. I've gotten at least one email from him in the past. Still, this raises a question. For me, the caesura is part of the rhythm of the poem, though I admit other people might not see it that way. I think the caesura should be at the end of a foot, never interrupting a foot. I realize it's harder to understand that way, but if you already understand the poem then it doesn't matter. I really only like to place caesuras at the end of lines because in that way the listener can start to develop a sense of the rhythm and know what to ex – bobsmith76 Nov 12 '21 at 23:24
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    @bobsmith76 By the usual definitions, a break at the end of a foot is called a diaresis; a caesura is defined as a break within the foot. – TKR Nov 12 '21 at 23:46
  • @bobsmith76 To help remember with that, caesura means a 'cutting,' as in you're cutting a foot into two. The splitting of a foot is by design. – cmw Nov 13 '21 at 00:32
  • ok, cool. again i find caesuras to be too counterintuitive. in music the rest note is part of the rhythm. you can't just pause whenever you want to when playing a song. maybe i'll open another thread on the issue. – bobsmith76 Nov 13 '21 at 01:58
  • @TKR Thanks! I had forgotten about the bucolic diaeresis, but now it all makes much more sense. I updated the answer to reflect that. – Joonas Ilmavirta Nov 13 '21 at 11:54
  • @bobsmith76 Yeah, it can be counter-intuitive that the main break of a verse is within a foot and not between them, although I do find caesuras more pleasing than diaereses. That's certainly worth exploring in other questions. Perhaps "how do we know it's so?" or something similar. Adding breaks when verses change is natural and certainly promotes the metric structure. – Joonas Ilmavirta Nov 13 '21 at 11:56
  • I do not see how you can pause after si or et. – fdb Nov 13 '21 at 15:51
  • @fdb The software that generates these potential pauses doesn't care about that, but we the readers certainly should. That's what I was getting at with my second last paragraph: These are the suggestions, and the reader is to pick what makes sense. It is a tool, not a definitive list of all actual pauses in a verse. I'll update to emphasize that. – Joonas Ilmavirta Nov 13 '21 at 16:05
  • @fdb Consider "do you want this or... that one?" - such a pause creates a sense of expectation and... continuity, propelling the line forwards. This becomes especially important to indicate when movement renders most clauses non-continuous (hyperbaton) and the reader needs to know whether to expect the end of the clause or its continuation. – Unbrutal_Russian Nov 16 '21 at 16:51