• DOI:10.1086/366554
• Corpus ID: 162877056

Review Article: Latin Prosody and Meter: Brevis Brevians

@article{Devine1980ReviewAL,
  title={Review Article: Latin Prosody and Meter: Brevis Brevians},
  author={A. M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens},
  journal={Classical Philology},
  year={1980},
  volume={75},
  pages={142 - 157}
}

• A. M. Devine, L. Stephens
• Published 1 April 1980
• Linguistics
• Classical Philology

We have always maintained that the linguist (as a professional in a technical area in which the general classicist is, relatively speaking, a layman) could make a significant contribution to the study of the classics or, more precisely, to those areas of endeavor, such as metrics and stylistics, which are crucially founded on a proper understanding of the nature and functioning of language. It was therefore with pleasure that we accepted the opportunity offered us of reviewing a book by an experienced linguist in a journal as widely read by the general classicist as Classical Philology. The particular book under review, however, turned out to be disappointingly unsuitable material to illustrate our contention, representing, we regret to say, rather the exception that proves the rule. Pulgram is aware of the fundamental position of linguistics in the study of metrics: "But perhaps the most remarkable and most disappointing aspect of many influential manuals on metrics, both ancient and modern, is the astonishing innocence of their authors in matters linguistic, even during most recent times when such a shortcoming can no longer be excused. For surely metricists ought to have realized long since that in metrics there are involved linguistic problems crying out for linguistic answers, and not only questions of aesthetics and recitation" (pp. 180-81). But he characteristically proceeds to attack strawmen. He cites the "cloyingly vapid" sentence of T. Fitzhugh: "The Muse of the procatalectic foot became enamored of the Delphic god, and Ennius twined the silver cord of quantity with the native gold of tone" (p. 181), which is, as Pulgram himself admits, hardly representative; and he attacks the mechanistic Hephaestionstyle metrics, which in fact tend to err more by not explaining than by explaining wrongly. The real problem lies with the unscientific character of Maasian and, worse still, post-Maasian metrics; and Pulgram quite misses the point when he cites, apparently with approval, Lloyd-Jones' claim that "modern theories are valuable only in so far as they are grounded upon the evidence of the texts" (p. 182). If this means that hypotheses designed to explain nonexistent data are false, then it is vacuous. If it means that the only relevant data are those of the texts, then it is simply wrong and obscures the crucial point that the data of the texts do not represent the totality of the facts to which metrical hypotheses must conform-they must also not contradict what is known and certain about language, for instance. The importance of this is, we hope, exemplified by our discussion of B(revis) B(revians) below. The central thesis of Pulgram's book is the hypothesis of a situation of diglossial from the third century B.C. on: vulgar/colloquial/informal Latin on the one hand