Do shorter words tend to come before longer ones in verse?

Question

The Finnish national epic Kalevala was written in a certain poetic meter, which in some respects resembles the classical Greek and Roman meters. In addition to rules regarding syllable length and stress and the poetic rhythm, there is a strong tendency to place the longest words (by syllable count) in a verse at the end and shorter ones at the beginning. (This together with rhythmic restrictions heavily limits the long words one can use in this meter.) Ending a line in a one-syllable word is considered to be outright forbidden. This tendency is known as "viskurilaki" in Finnish, and it's not limited to poetry.

Does classical Latin poetry have a similar tendency? Does the length of a word correlate with its location in a verse in any way? Is this explicitly mentioned in poetry guides or has it been studied?

(I have limited this to classical Latin poetry. If the answer is different and interesting for Greek or later Latin, please leave a comment. Details should be taken to a separate question.)

Answer 1

After doing a rudimentary corpus analysis of the Vergil's Aeneid, my conclusion is that Latin verse does not show any meaningful relationship between syllable length and word position.

To test this, I wrote up a rudimentary Python program that went through the whole text of the Aeneid and found the syllable length of every word, grouping them by their position in the text. This is admittedly crude, but should give at least some indication of a tendency. Here are my results:

pos     words   min     max     avg
0       9896    1       7       2.41
1       9892    1       8       2.26
2       9873    1       7       2.35
3       9853    1       7       2.36
4       9813    1       7       2.52
5       8393    1       6       2.46
6       4429    1       6       2.36
7       1310    1       4       2.23
8       196     1       4       2.08
9       20      1       3       1.75
10      1       3       3       3.0

EDIT: I did a quick modification to measure just the last word, and the results are nearly identical:

pos     words   min     max     avg
-1      9896    1       7       2.43

Where:

• pos = 0-indexed word position in a line (e.g. "arma" gets a 0, "virumque" gets a 1, etc.)
• words = number of words in given position
• min = minimum number of syllables of a word in given position
• max = maximum number
• avg = average syllable count in that position

As you can see, short 1-syllable words occur ubiquitously in any position. Longer words also seem to occur uniformly, though because very long 7-syllable words are so rare, they won't occur in smaller sample sizes because of standard deviation. The average too hovers at about the same value and only changes when the sample size gets too small.

N.B. I have never formally studied statistics, so I am happy to improve the metrics if someone can provide a better heuristic. I can also come up with some graphs if that would be helpful.

Also, as a caveat, my syllable counting program is the slip-shod work of two minutes: it works correctly for the first 10 verses of the Aeneid, but obviously a better implementation could catch more edge cases.

Here is my program for reference:

import re
from collections import defaultdict

text = """full text with line breaks here. I took text from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/227/227-h/227-h.htm and removed chapter headings"""

text = ''.join(c for c in text if c.isalpha() or c.isspace())
def syllables(word):
    return len(re.findall(r'^i[aeiou]|a[eiu]|o[ei]|[aeiouy]', word.lower())) - word.count('qu')

verse_lengths = defaultdict(list) 
for verse in text.split('\n'):
    for i, word in enumerate(verse.split()):
        verse_lengths[i].append(syllables(word))

print('{}\t{}\t{}\t{}\t{}'.format('pos', 'words', 'min', 'max', 'avg'))   
for pos, word_lengths in verse_lengths.items():
    avg = round(sum(word_lengths) / len(word_lengths), 2)
    print('{}\t{}\t{}\t{}\t{}'.format(pos, len(word_lengths), min(word_lengths), max(word_lengths), avg))

Answer 2

As promised before in a comment, I made a corpus analysis of whether word length, in terms of number of syllables, is correlated with position in the verse.

Spoiler alert: it isn't. brianpck has already done a basic corpus analysis with essentially the right conclusion, but I intended to do this as thoroughly as possible in order to hone my primitive skills as a statistician (meaning: please respond to any errors I may have made), and to make good on the aforementioned promise.

Input corpus

I used a hexameter corpus consisting of:

• Vergilius, Bucolica
• Vergilius, Aeneis
• Ovidius, Metamorphoses

Caveats

Only verses that are scanned correctly by my Latin verse scanning tool are taken into account. This is 94.7% of the existing corpus (21525 out of 22723 verses) as of the time of this writing. There's a whole host of reasons why a verse wouldn't be scanned correctly, e.g.:

• hiatus in the verse
• hypermetricality (elision over verse boundaries)
• unfinished verses
• multiple possible scans
• non-intuitive scansions of foreign words
• other flukes

There are a small number of words that just cannot be determined correctly e.g. the word VOLVI can be either bisyllabic volvi (< volvere) or volui (< velle). There is no way to distinguish between these forms if the vol- part is in the second half of a foot: vo̱l|vi or vo̯lu̯|i, except by leveraging dictionary or even semantic knowledge. But the occurrence of this kind of problem should be rare enough to not influence the data significantly.

I didn't check for elided syllables, so e.g. multum ille et in Verg. Aen. I, 3 is counted as a sequence of words of 2, 2, and 1 syllables.

Data analysis

I compared the actual vs the expected word length of words in verses: this essentially normalized the data to always have an expected value of 1, in order to allow using the data set of the 4-word verses together with the 11-word ones.

For example, any word in a verse consisting of 5 words that is 15 syllables in total, has an expected syllable count of 3. A verse consisting of 10 words and 14 syllables in total will contain on average a word of 1.4 syllables.

By doing the calculation (actual * number of words / number of syllables), any word in any verse has an expected normalized weight of 1, no matter how many words and how many total syllables the verse contains.

My results are:

+---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------+------+------+------+
| word position |   1   |   2   |   3   |   4   |   5   |   6   |   7   |  8   |  9   |  10  |  11  |
+---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------+------+------+------+
| count         | 21525 | 21525 | 21525 | 21525 | 21456 | 18340 | 10133 | 3308 |  636 |   76 |    7 |
| average       |  0.95 |  0.92 |  0.97 |  0.98 |  1.03 |  1.07 |  1.12 | 1.17 | 1.20 | 1.17 | 1.43 |
| st dev        |  0.40 |  0.33 |  0.35 |  0.35 |  0.39 |  0.37 |  0.34 | 0.33 | 0.38 | 0.44 | 0.43 |
| variance      |  0.16 |  0.11 |  0.12 |  0.12 |  0.15 |  0.13 |  0.11 | 0.11 | 0.15 | 0.19 | 0.19 |
| # of st devs  |  0.12 |  0.25 |  0.07 |  0.07 |  0.08 |  0.19 |  0.35 | 0.52 | 0.53 | 0.38 | 0.98 |
+---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------+------+------+------+


+---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------+------+------+-------+
| word position |  -1   |  -2   |  -3   |  -4   |  -5   |  -6   |  -7   |  -8  |  -9  | -10  |  -11  |
+---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------+------+------+-------+
| count         | 21525 | 21525 | 21525 | 21525 | 21456 | 18340 | 10133 | 3308 |  636 |   76 |     7 |
| average       |  1.01 |  1.24 |  0.94 |  0.94 |  0.96 |  0.96 |  0.91 | 0.87 | 0.82 | 0.83 |  0.66 |
| st dev        |  0.25 |  0.37 |  0.37 |  0.33 |  0.35 |  0.39 |  0.40 | 0.39 | 0.36 | 0.37 |  0.02 |
| variance      |  0.06 |  0.14 |  0.14 |  0.11 |  0.13 |  0.15 |  0.16 | 0.15 | 0.13 | 0.14 |  0.00 |
| # of st devs  |  0.06 |  0.64 |  0.17 |  0.18 |  0.10 |  0.09 |  0.21 | 0.34 | 0.49 | 0.45 | 16.77 |
+---------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+------+------+------+-------+

word position -1 means the last word in a verse, -2 the second to last, etc

The last line of every table is the most important one, because it points to how significant the difference is between actual and expected data. In order to be statistically significant, we want the value in this row to be at least 2.

Conclusion

So the only place where the actual length of words deviates significantly from the expected value is the eleventh-last word in verses of 11 words long, so the first. All 11-word verses start with a monosyllable, but given that there are only 7 such instances in the entire corpus, this is negligible. If any of these 7 instances hadn't had a monosyllable as a first word, then the sigma value would've been 1.30 instead of 16.77.

All other values are not statistically significant, so no, there is no correlation between word position and word length expressed in syllables.

FYI I can provide the raw data on request

Answer 3

The Wikipedia page on "Dactylic hexameter" (¯˘͟˘ | ¯˘͟˘ | ¯˘͟˘ | ¯˘͟˘ | ¯ ˘˘ | ¯˘̱) says

Like their Greek predecessors, classical Latin poets avoided a large number of word breaks at the ends of foot divisions except between the fourth and fifth, where it was encouraged. In order to preserve the rhythmic close, Latin poets avoided the placement of a single syllable or four-syllable word at the end of a line.

More relevant to the Finnish pattern you mention, although less relevant to Classical Latin, is the following quotation:

In the late empire, writers experimented again by adding unusual restrictions to the standard hexameter. The rhopalic verse of Ausonius is a good example; besides following the standard hexameter pattern, each word in the line is one syllable longer than the previous, e.g.:

Spes, deus, aeternae stationis conciliator,
si castis precibus veniales invigilamus,
his, pater, oratis placabilis adstipulare.

Unfortunately, the relevant sections of the Wikipedia article are unsourced so it's hard for me to say how accurate this is.

The phenomenon of caesura also seems like it could be relevant; apparently a caesura is always located at a word break, and occurs within a foot. The "principal caesura" of a line usually comes in the third or fourth foot according to Joel Derfner's answer to the linked question.

(Please downvote this answer if you have reason to believe the statements from the Wikipedia article are incorrect or if you are unsure about them. I don't want to propagate misinformation; I'm just posting this to get the ball rolling.)