meter 7 centuries ago
 

A Grecian Artifact Evokes Tales From the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’

wait, wrong subject. Meter so long ago I can't even do the math.

Hmm. I remember scanning Propertius at school and stumbling over Ariadnen, which required a long i, before the teacher told me it scanned following Greek rules. It's odd when things scan according to a system you don't anticipate (though I should really have guessed).

Cheers,
John

Homeric language is full of odd forms. I wonder if he is referring to the evaporated digamma (which looked like our F) and which had a woofy sound (W) not present the written Homeric texts. Just my two obols.

Kazakh has the digamma with the same sound. It's the sound of the Turkic g in Erdogan, I'd never made the Homeric connection. :-)

Cheers,
John

In our received Homeric texts, the W is absent, which means that since it is a consonant, its original presence which had led to specific scansion patterns in certain formulaic expressions (patterns which persisted even after the digamma ceased to be pronounced) no longer conformed to the needs of dactylic hexameter. I will let someone else explain how the metrical difficulties were resolved. An example is the earlier WANAX vs. the later ANAX.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anax

Further, from : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactylic_hexameter

Finally, even after accepting the various alterations admitted by Homer, some lines remain impossible to scan as they stand now, e.g. Iliad I.108 "not a good word spoken nor brought to pass":

ἐσθλὸν δ’ οὐτέ τί πω εἶπας ἔπος οὔτ’ ἐτέλεσσας
The first three feet of this line scan spondee-dactyl-spondee, but the fourth foot of -πας ἔπος has three consecutive short syllables. These metrical inconsistencies (along with a knowledge of comparative linguistics) have led scholars to infer the presence of a lost digamma consonant in an old form of that line. In this example, the word ἔπος was originally ϝέπος in Ionian; this consonant lengthens the last syllable of the preceding εἶπας and corrects the apparent defect in the meter. This example demonstrates the oral tradition of the Homeric epics that flourished long before they were written down sometime in the 7th century BC.

Sort of. But there are many cases where Homeric meter only makes sense if you keep the innovative forms. The /w/ sound if restored to all its etymological positions would disrupt the meter far more than it would contribute to it. Homeric Greek is composed of several layers seperated from each other in time and somewhat in space.

Pretty well put.