Talk:Arsis and thesis

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The first sentence of this stub (the one dealing with the musical meaning of arsis and thesis) seems pretty convoluted and confusing to me. Can it be rewritten to make clearer what this term means in a musical context, perhaps with some (a) musical examples and (b) references to scholarly writing?

128.36.205.202 (talk) 18:51, 15 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. The whole topic is very confusing (try comparing Kennedy, Gildersleeve and Lodge, Raven, West, Smyth, etc), which is why Raven, as well as West, want to reformulate it. The topic isn't only relevant to hexameters - in Horace Ode 1.3.36 we have lengthening in arsis (Nisbet and Hubbard have a different view) in a choriamb, and I think you should discuss Greek and Latin iambic poetry too, as it's not clear if the first syllable of an iamb would be the arsis, or the second syllable (because long). Vince Calegon (talk) 12:30, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The question is, whether (–⏑⏑) is better than (– u u). Personally I think it isn't. The little tiny "u" shapes are aesthetically displeasing, first because they appear to be of a smaller font-size than the macrons, and secondly because they appear not to be on the same level. They are also more difficult to type and may not come out properly on all computers. In my view there is nothing wrong with (– u u). It is very clear, and looks nice. Kanjuzi (talk) 06:23, 1 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm in favor of –⏑⏑; it has the potential of looking more professional depending on the fonts chosen by the browser and the breve ⏑ (U+23D1 METRICAL BREVE) is meant for this purpose, while – u u always looks sort of like something from an ASCII document from the early days of the web (though – isn't ASCII).

Whether the breve and "macron" in –⏑⏑ are the same size depends on the font; in the fonts my browser is using (Firefox on Linux), they look about the same size and are at about the same level. (Oddly, the en dash is displayed in DejaVu Sans and the breves in Symbola.) I think when I viewed them in Firefox or Chrome on Windows 10, they looked worse. That probably means that many users will have bad-looking or ill-paired characters.

Unfortunately, there isn't a correct character to use for the macron here, because Unicode hasn't yet adopted the proposals to encode a full complement of metrical symbols, which would include a metrical macron, but using ⏑ for the breve is correct, if it matters. — Eru·tuon 18:53, 7 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]