This automatic macronizer lets you quickly mark all the long vowels Maintenance and continuous development! Any amount is very much Time-saving, please consider making a donation, to support If you use the macronizer regularly and find it helpful and When tested on a couple of books of theĪeneid (from the eminent Dickinson CollegeĬommentaries), this has been demonstrated to cut the number ofĮrroneous vowel lengths in half! Currently, dactylic hexametersĪnd elegiac distichs are supported other meters may be added.Īlso, I have now added a PayPal donation button: July 2016: I am happy to announce that the Macronizer now isĪble to take the meter into account when guessing the vowel October 2016: The performance on texts written in all uppercase letters has been greatly improved. May 2017: I have now made the macronized text editable, which means that it will now be much easier to correct typos or misspellings while proofreading the text. Ĭompare result with correctly macronized input text.Īugust 2017: More meters added! The macronizer can now handle hendecasyllables as well as distichs of iambic trimeters and dimeters ( Beātus ille quī procul negōtiīs.). To improve the result, try to scan the text as. To begin to look at graphic scansion, we first must look at a couple of symbols that are used to scan a poem.Note: In order to avoid time out from the server, input longer than 50000 characters will be truncated. For a discussion of the others, I refer you to Fussell, page 18. Since the most commonly and most easily used is graphic, we will use it in our discussion. There are three kinds of scansion: the graphic, the musical and the acoustic. This technique is called scansion, and it is important because it puts visual markers onto an otherwise entirely heard phenomenon. To get a bearing on what these rhythms look and sound like, let's start with a method for writing out the rhythms of a poem. The former is the more common adherence to the latter often leads an English language poet toward self-conscious verse, as their predictable rhythms are counter to natural English speech (not that it is impossible to create great verse with this technique, but there is a tendency for it to end up so). For this reason most English language poets opt to look at their own meter as accentual or accentual-syllabic. There may be one, two, or three syllables between accents (or more, but this is a matter of debate). This means that its natural rhythms are not found naturally from syllable to syllable, but rather from one accent to the next. English, being of Germanic origin, is a predominantly accentual language. Of the ways of looking at meter, the most common in English are those that are accentual. Quantitative: Measures the duration of words.Accentual-syllabic: A counting of syllables and accents.Accentual: A counting of accents only per line.Syllabic: A general counting of syllables per line.Fussell defines meter as "what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance." (4-5) To "meter" something, then, is to "measure" it (the word meter itself is derived from the Greek for measure), and there are four common ways to view meter.
Although some of Fussell's ideas are a bit outdated (namely, he doesn't deal with the visual elements of a poem), his approach is complete, concise and useful. The bible of most poets today regarding meter and sound is a book by Paul Fussell called Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. The crafting of the aural aspects of a poem is what we may call "ear training." Thus, the crafting of the visual aspects is what we'd call "eye training." Meter A brief exploration of the various aspects of sound that can be utilized when making a poem.