Author Topic: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle  (Read 1252 times)

ridethetalk

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Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« on: July 20, 2021, 03:09:44 PM »
Srsly - HEXAMETER common??? It's even mixing units of measure!!! Metres and feet!!!  :-P :-P :-P
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blackrockrose

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2021, 05:23:55 PM »
Hi John

Forgive me if I'm stating something you already know, but poetic metre (rhythm) has nothing to do with the 1000mm unit of linear measure   ;)

yelnats

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #2 on: July 20, 2021, 08:45:41 PM »
Quote
Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature,
Wikipedia.

Can anyone explain why the "standard epic metre is a hexameter and it is not (also) hexametre?

blackrockrose

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #3 on: July 20, 2021, 08:55:47 PM »
I, for one, cannot explain it, unless it relies on the British English distinction between metre (a measurement) and meter (an instrument for measuring).

Mike?

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #4 on: July 20, 2021, 09:32:46 PM »
Off the top of my head no.
I think they all derive ultimately from the same source which is the Greek word for 'measure'

TRex?

ridethetalk

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #5 on: July 20, 2021, 09:34:04 PM »
Hi John

Forgive me if I'm stating something you already know, but poetic metre (rhythm) has nothing to do with the 1000mm unit of linear measure   ;)
Yeah, I knew that but I thought it funny nonetheless... After all, I kinda like wordplay...
Still and all, is hexameter that common? :-R
The greenest watt ever produced is the one you never use. Playing as jk1956 & John is my name.
When we come out of the Covid-19 crisis, we need to make sure recovery efforts address the Climate Crisis (which can't be solved using social distancing!)

TRex

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #6 on: July 21, 2021, 01:47:30 AM »
Off the top of my head no.
I think they all derive ultimately from the same source which is the Greek word for 'measure'

TRex?

No idea, but I checked the OED which has this:
Quote
Etymology: < Latin hexameter adjective and (sc. versus ) noun, < Greek ἑξάμετρος , < ἑξα- hexa- comb. form + μέτρον measure, metre. Compare French hexamètre (1511).

Since the French uses hexamètre I'd have guessed British English would use hexametre. But whereas the OED has an entry for kilometre | kilometer, n (both spellings), the entry is hexameter, adj. and n..

But 'English is logical' said no one, ever!

mkenuk

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #7 on: July 21, 2021, 02:22:05 AM »
From Wikipedia
Etymology (of metre /meter)

The etymological roots of metre can be traced to the Greek verb μετρέω (metreo) (to measure, count or compare) and noun μέτρον (metron) (a measure), which were used for physical measurement, for poetic metre and by extension for moderation or avoiding extremism (as in "be measured in your response"). This range of uses is also found in Latin (metior, mensura), French (mètre, mesure), English and other languages. The Greek word is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *meh₁- 'to measure'. The motto ΜΕΤΡΩ ΧΡΩ (metro chro) in the seal of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), which was a saying of the Greek statesman and philosopher Pittacus of Mytilene and may be translated as "Use measure!", thus calls for both measurement and moderation. The use of the word metre (for the French unit mètre) in English began at least as early as 1797.


blackrockrose

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #8 on: July 21, 2021, 09:21:46 AM »
Going back to John's original question, hexameter is fairly common for me (I tried tetrameter as well, with no luck) but I'm prepared to accept that it won't be for anyone who hasn't studied a language at tertiary level.

TRex

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #9 on: July 21, 2021, 09:51:01 AM »
FWIW, methinks hexameter should be known by a moderately well-read person.

ridethetalk

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #10 on: July 21, 2021, 05:36:07 PM »
FWIW, methinks hexameter should be known by a moderately well-read person.

Obviously, I mustn't be reading the right things...  ;D ;D ;D
The greenest watt ever produced is the one you never use. Playing as jk1956 & John is my name.
When we come out of the Covid-19 crisis, we need to make sure recovery efforts address the Climate Crisis (which can't be solved using social distancing!)

jem01060

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #11 on: July 21, 2021, 07:39:36 PM »
Dactylic hexameter, iambic pentameter: I learned those terms in junior high school in New York City fifty years ago, when I was taught how to scan poetry (of a certain type) written in English. Of course, one also scans Latin poetry and poetry written in other languages. To me, hexameter is an extremely common word.
« Last Edit: July 21, 2021, 11:27:21 PM by jem01060 »

Calilasseia

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #12 on: July 23, 2021, 04:43:30 PM »
Ah, the fun of poetic metre.

In the past, poetry was based upon the arrangement of stresses within the words contained in a line (I'll cover a complication in a little moment). Specific rhythmic arrangements of stresses, and their number, all have their own terms, known as meters. Rhyme was a much later development, and one that appears to be peculiar to English (unless someone else here knows better).

Possibly the canonical example of ancient poetry relying upon metre is Virgil's Aeneid, consisting of 12 books written entirely in dactylic hexameter. This form has six stresses arranged in a particular order. Stresses usually (but not always) fall upon long syllables, and so, the arrangement of syllables is important in metric poetry. A long syllable followed by two short syllables is a dactyl (-..), a spondee is two long syllables (--), and a trochee is a long syllable followed by a short syllable (-.) Each of these groups of syllables is known as a metrical foot.

Consequently, hexameter poetry has six metrical feet, and dactylic hexameter has those six feet arranged in a particular pattern. that pattern usually consists of five dactyls, followed by a spondee or trochee for the sixth of the metrical feet, though some works in dactylic hexameter also permit the substitution of spondees in the first four positions. Strict dactylic hexameter has the following arrangement of metrical feet:

-.. -.. -.. -.. -.. {-- or -.}

Poetry conforming to this specification was possible in Latin, because Latin is a completely inflected language, where meaning is conveyed by spelling changes, and therefore there is considerable freedom of word position in a sentence. You can change the word order in a Latin sentence without destroying meaning, because the precise grammatical function of each word is conveyed explicitly by systematic spelling changes for each different function. There were some rules for word order that applied in Latin, but these rules were pretty fluid as a result of the existence of complete inflection.

Languages that have lost complete inflection, of which English is a canonical example, make life much harder for any poet striving to apply metre. Rhyme, on the other hand is uniquely facilitated by English.

Now for a complicating factor. Classical Greek also features metre in its poetry, but in this case, one also has to take into account that Classical Greek placed emphasis upon musical pitch instead of stress for emphasis. Classical Greek has its own rules for the placement of accents denoting pitch changes in the pronunciation of a word (though these rules were, if one is to be rigorous, invented much later to make life easier for non-native Greek speakers and readers - I've covered the hilarity of how Greek was written in the 5th century BCE in another post). Just to make life harder if you delve into Greek poetry in the original, there are several different systems, not only for different literary genres (comedy, epic poetry, lyric poetry etc) but different systems for varying Greek dialects (the Homeric dialect used in The Odyssey and The Iliad stands out as something of an outlier - this was a composite formulated by Homer explicitly for the composition of epic works).

The above should explain why learning to read a wide range of works in the original Greek is a lifetime occupation. :)

As an aside, it should be noted that Enoch Powell, of "rivers of blood" fame, was, outside of his political life, an extremely diligent Greek scholar. However much you may despise his politics, you cannot subtract from him the effort he expended within the field of Classical Greek scholarship. Indeed, one of the projects he was working on prior to his death, was a complete re-examination from scratch, of the Koiné Greek texts used to compile the New Testament. Though the fun and games involved in the use of Koiné Greek for the New Testament is deserving of its own dedicated encyclopaedia, given the twists and turns that have been uncovered by two millennia of scholarship, including the non-trivial business of determining whether, for example, marks on original documents were simply blemishes in the papyrus medium, or actual iota subscripts intended to be in place by the authors. That one has caused many headaches over the years.

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les303

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #13 on: July 23, 2021, 05:52:39 PM »
No offence Cal, but i think i need an aspirin.

Alan W

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Re: Monday 19th July 7-by-many HEXAMETER puzzle
« Reply #14 on: July 26, 2021, 09:59:03 PM »
On the one hand, hexameter is quite a specialist word, relevant mainly to poetry in languages other than English. A book review in The Spectator in June reported that:

Quote
His stated goals as a translator are modest: ‘Dactylic hexameter does not work well in English, and I abandon it entirely in this translation, preferring a rough five-beat iambic line that accurately preserves the meaning of the Greek.’

The word may have been covered in junior high school in New York fifty years ago, but I suspect it might have vanished from the curriculum in more recent years. It may have been mentioned in my schooling, more like sixty years ago, because I did play the word.

On the other hand, the related word pentameter is probably better known since most of Shakespeare and a lot of other English poetry taught in schools is written in iambic pentameters. And a player who knows the word pentameter and knows something about prefixes denoting numbers may infer the existence of tetrameter, hexameter, heptameter, etc. (Of these words, pentameter and hexameter are the ones that are currently common in Chi.) That might help to explain the fact that about half the players of the puzzle in question did play hexameter.

What decides the issue for me is that I consider the all-letter word in each puzzle should be unmistakably common, so that anyone who doesn't think of it will be satisfied that they could have thought of it. So I'm going to make hexameter rare and drop it as a puzzle seed word.
Alan Walker
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