Accents and Scansion

All latin syllables are either long or short and stressed or unstressed. The metre of Latin poetry, unlike English poetry, is dependent on the length of the syllables rather than their accent.

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Length

The two different lengths for syllables are long (indicated by a macron ˉ ) and short (indicated by a breve ˇ ). All syllables are either one or the other. A syllable’s length is determined by both its nature and its position. If a syllable is long by nature that means that the vowel sound is long and pronounced differently to its short counterpart. For example:

style="background-color:#eeeeff;"|ā is pronounced as in cart

style="background-color:#eeeeff;"|ă is pronounced as in cut