From hancock@dircon.co.uk Sun Sep 10 11:35:22 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA31924 for ; Sun, 10 Sep 2000 11:35:21 -0700 Received: from mailhost1.dircon.co.uk (mailhost1.dircon.co.uk [194.112.32.65]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA18080 for ; Sun, 10 Sep 2000 11:35:20 -0700 Received: from main (th-en137-027.pool.dircon.co.uk [194.112.55.27]) by mailhost1.dircon.co.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id TAA41400 for ; Sun, 10 Sep 2000 19:35:14 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: <006d01c01b55$8bbf15e0$8b3770c2@main> From: "Ralph Hancock" To: References: <001401c01a65$47682300$5d509318@ne.mediaone.net> Subject: Re: Roman die inscription Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 18:53:19 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Some more thoughts from Mindaugas Strockis: ------------------------- I just thought: the sentence 'Digamma tu(um) est [tuum (e)st?]: hort(i), urbis, Italia', with the elisions made in poetry, would have 12 syllables. Of course, it is not at all a correct iambic trimeter, but here one can recall the 'hexameter' by Commodianus: Nec enim vitupero divitias datas a Summo. Perhaps I am fantasising too daringly, but I wonder whether the line on the die could have been taken for 'iambic', on the lines of Commodianus' 'hexameter'. The collapse of classical quantitative poetry is generally placed in the 3rd or 4th centuries AD, as far as I know. If all this is correct, the die could be approximately dated on these grounds. Also, considering the natural word stress, the line could be as good for an imitation of a quantitative iambic with natural word stress as Commodianus' verse is, as can be seen. As to digamma, the use of single letters in verse with the intention that their names be pronounced in full, is not at all atypical, cf. many poems by Ausonius. I agree with James L. Pfundstein that nom. pl. ending -is is archaic. Perhaps it could be a deliberate archaism, used decoratively. Not a perfect explanation, but not so incredible, considering, for example, the Greek style of the New Testament, where the flow of the colloquial Greek of the time is from time to time adorned with classical forms, sometimes even not quite understood by the authors themselves. I myself least like the reduction of double u in 'tuum'. As for a similar, though not exactly relevant, example, ancient grammarians testified that the dative pronoun 'ei' was to be pronounced 'ejji', and they even suggested to spell it 'eiii', what of course no one did. ------------- Ralph Hancock hancock@dircon.co.uk http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~hancock/antioch.htm .