![]() ![]() Winnicott’s concept of one’s “fundamental orientation toward language,” the idea that, as I understand it, our earliest experiences with language deeply and irrevocably influence our ongoing usages, tendencies, and conceptualizations of language. Although my Keystone State pals could never hear the twang, these evidences perhaps make a case that there’s something inherently “southern” about my approach to English.Īt a writing conference a few years after my scansion assignment, the poet Tom Sleigh introduced to the workshop child psychologist D.W. Likewise, upon meeting her at a writing conference, the impeccably keen poet Melissa “Ranger” Range (herself a native of Johnson City, Tennessee) immediately discerned my birthplace: “You’re from Chattanooga, aren’t ya, girl?” she asked, within minutes of meeting me. When I submitted my answers, however, the quiz generated the three best guesses for the place from which I hail: 1) Chattanooga, TN (my hometown!), 2) Louisville, KY, and 3) Huntsville, AL. I didn’t expect accuracy, as so many people in my temporary home of Pennsylvania had lamented over the fact that I didn’t have a “pleasant” Southern accent, despite having spent all of my life up until that point in the South. ![]() When I got home and murmured these poems to myself, my pencil hovering over each syllable, I sometimes substituted in idiosyncratic stress patterns, influenced heavily by the region in which I learned to speak.Ī few years ago, I took a dialect quiz from the New York Times in which I had to answer questions like what I call the concrete or green space between two roads (“median”) and how I say “lawyer” (not “LOY-er,” but “LAW-yer,” where “-yer” is more a grace note than a syllable). The problem, I realized later, was that I’d heard my prof read aloud our poems of study, with his Minnesotan (albeit long estranged) pronunciations, and with all the natural cadences of his speech that the poem’s diction and syntax could afford. I’d gone into the assignment feeling confident that I’d be able to scan a poem, as the scansion exercises we’d done as a class had made so much intuitive sense to me. Broken down into small 'checklists', each corresponding to a group of four passages, the vocabulary is learnt cumulatively and as it is encountered.When I got back my scansion assignment, a grad school project in which I had to chart the stress patterns in a few Weldon Kees poems, I was startled to see that my prof David had revised quite a few of my notations, citing that I’d used more unstressed syllables than was correct. A guideline verse vocabulary list is provided which covers words particularly common in Ovid's works. A step-by-step guide to scansion, with practice exercises and answers, covers the essential principles for scanning lines of Latin verse, from the basics of understanding syllables, feet and types of metres, to coping with elision and caesurae. The comprehensive introduction provides an overview of Ovid's life and work, an account of some of the stylistic features of his poetry, and practical help in the form of tips on how to approach the more challenging lines of Latin verse and produce a fluent translation. ![]() ![]() These are followed by longer passages with scansion exercises and questions on comprehension and stylistic analysis, replicating unseen verse exam questions in full. The first set of passages are translation exercises of 12-16 lines, each accompanied by a Discendum box which highlights a key feature of poetic Latin, equipping students further with the skills to tackle ever more difficult verse passages at first sight. Every passage begins with an introduction, outlining the basic story and theme of the passage, followed by a 'lead-in' sentence, paraphrasing the few lines before the passage begins. Taken from across Ovid's works, including the Metamorphoses, Fasti, Heroides, Amores and Tristia, the passages help build students' knowledge and confidence in a notoriously difficult element of Latin language learning. Ovid Unseens provides a bank of 80 practice passages of Latin verse, half elegiac and half hexameter. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |