Allen and Greenough offer this tip for learning the rhythm of Latin poetry:
“‘Scanning aloud’ is sometimes useful in the early stages of the study of Latin meter. Scanning aloud ignores the natural stress of the Latin words, instead treating all long syllables as stressed, all short syllables as unstressed. In effect, this technique replaces a quantitative pattern with a stress pattern.” -§607n1
- If they mean what I believe they mean, I don’t see where this would be effective
- Personally, I found that learning Latin verse based on the stress of its meter, not its syllables, works well
- Would a spondee be read with double stress in this method? What would that accomplish?
Here’s an earlier post I did on a site with some sample readings aloud.
Does anyone else have experience with / thoughts on how to read Greek and Latin aloud, and how to use this as a teaching tool?
I had the fortune of reading about 50 lines of Greek and 40 lines of Latin in front of the kids at the Center for Talented Youth this summer. They were very taken with it. This was during a camp talent show with a Harry Potter theme, so, to preface, I told them that Greek was the language of Hufflepuff (with all its aspirates), and Latin the language of Slytherin (which was at least true of Aeneid 6.1-41, the highly sibilant passage I read them).
The Essential AG: 607 n1
Latin for Addicts 