Thread by @azforeman

The difficulty that Elizabethan poets had in trying to write quantitative meters in English is usually assumed to stem from the fact that English lacked contrastive vowel length. This is not so. (Thread...)

Latin as, say, Virgil knew it probably had an inventory as follows

Short /a ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ (y)/
Long /a: e: i: o: u: (y:)/
Diphthongs /ʊɪ aɪ ɔɪ au̯ ɛu̯/

The English as known to, say, Philip Sydney had the following (or something very similar):

Short /a ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ/ (as in: sat, set, sit, sot, gut)
Long /æ: e: i: o: u:/, (as in: pale, peal, peel, pole, pool)
Diphthongs /æɪ ɜɪ ɔɪ ɞu̯ ɪu̯ ɛu̯/ (as in: pail, pile, boy, now, due, dew)

Plus one triphthong /u̯ɜɪ/ (as in: point). The contrast between venit /we:nɪt/ "he came" and venit /wɛnɪt/ "he comes" in Classical Latin was not all that different from the contrast between seating /se:tɪŋ/ and setting /sɛtɪŋ/ in the English Sidney spoke.

Elizabethan and Jacobean English phoneticians were well aware that their language contained vowels which differed in duration. Indeed, they found it easier to describe contrasts of duration rather than tenseness or height.

No writer on English pronunciation before 1619 describes anything but a length contrast for /ɪ i:/ and /ʊ u:/. They all give e.g. bit/beet, pool/pull as simple length-pairs. They were also aware that Latin had long and short vowels, and that these were important in versification.

Now, there were certainly differences between Late Republican Latin and Elizabethan English.

In Latin (in careful speech, anyway) contrastive length existed even in unstressed syllables, as in puta "girl" and putā "think!" (1.sg.imp.), and placement of word-accent depended on syllable weight — and thus often on vowel-length.

In English, vowel-reduction in unstressed syllables limited the possible vowel-contrasts there, accentuation was lexically specified, and syllable weight played a much more marginal role.

Still, there is no intrinsic reason why Classical quantitative meters, with suitable adaptation, couldn't work in English. It would be trivially easy compared to the adaptation and successful use of Persian quantitative meters in Turkic languages.

The reason appears to be that, although they were aware that English vowel contrasts had a durational element, and although they were aware of durational contrast as a feature of Classical Latin described by Classical grammarians,

the prosodic vowel length of Classical Latin bore little relation to Latin as it was pronounced by Elizabethan Englishmen.

Nonetheless, Philip Sidney’s attempt to write classical quantitative verse in English was actually pretty successful. More so than people have tended to realize.

If you plug in the vowels of late 16th century English, and allow for certain syllable-types as having indeterminate weight, the quantitative pattern works well with a measured speech-rhythm. Here's my recording of Sidney's quantitative sapphics:

dropbox.com/s/4ht6vir1c1zj…

There’s nothing intrinsic about English that makes quantitative meter impossible. But you have to break free of Latinate ideas of what a heavy and light syllable are, and listen to your language very carefully.

Sidney’s quantitative scansion is in some respects more like that of Persian than Greek or Latin. Among all Renaissance attempts to write quantitative English verse, he alone seems to have attended to the actual sounds of English,

and related them to contemporary realizations coming from the continent about the nature of ancient Latin pronunciation.