Linguistics (cont.)
- Over the years textual critics identified a range of constraints on word end in Greek and Latin verse known as bridge rules; they were often named after the scholars who discovered them, including characters of mythological stature in the history of Classical scholarship like Bentley, Porson and Wilamowitz. Verses that violate a bridge rule are unmetrical. If such a line turns up in a manuscript, it needs to be emended; and if it turns up in a student composition, it merits stern reprimand. In order to understand bridge rules (and indeed to formulate them precisely) we need to know what exactly are the properties of the Greek and Latin languages that cause their metrical systems to have such rules.
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