Caesura

Poetry

Starting from a certain length, the towards, in the metric ones of many cultures, are rather generally subdivided in several “parts” or components. One names caesura the place where these components are articulated. The caesura of the ancient meters obeys particular rules (caesura penthémimère , hepthémimère , trochaïque cut …). To consult for example Hexameter dactylic and Scansion .

In French

The Metric French, medieval and traditional, only the decasyllables and the alexandrines is included in the category of long” or “made up” worms the “. The place of the caesura is fixed: in the Alexandrine, it delimits two Hémistiche S or under-towards of the same length, is six syllables:

I am Roman, alas, // since my husband is. (Pierre Corneille, Horace , 1st edition).

In the ordinary decasyllable, both under-towards are respectively of four and six syllables:

time from goes away, // time from goes away my Lady (Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets in Marie ).

The traditional poets post- play with the caesura of the alexandrine which becomes the place of a tension, sometimes near to the rupture, between the metric diagram, which remain immutably caesura 6//6, and syntax, which does not suffer any cut coinciding with the caesura:

And the tiger-cat épou//vantable of Hyrcanie (Paul Verlaine, In the cave ).

One will take care not to confuse the caesura with the cuts . Whereas the caesura is a metric fact , which belongs to the diagram, or abstract model worms (6//6 for the alexandrine), the cuts result from a rhythmic analysis of the statement which constitutes worms given. Any statement, that it is in prose or worms, lends itself to a subjective and specific analysis rhythmic founded on its tonic accents. Only the made up worms have a caesura.

According to a rule as traditional as fuzzy, the caesura should coincide with the fine of a direction . In practice, the theorists of the traditional period, like Lancelot or Richelet, often tried to formulate it in a more precise way, by enumerating words on which the caesura could not “fall”, like the determinants and the prepositions. Worms in which the caesura separates a preposition from its mode, like:

In front of it & // the fire of his love

Good-bye, I from go away to // Paris for my businesses

are considered to be false by Richelet. Whatever the precision of the formulated rules, one has to admit that there will always remain of the borderline cases and the specific exceptions.

The nature of the caesura could, also, evolve/move with time and the style. If, at the traditional period, the not elided female syllables are banished as well caesura as of the subsequent position (syllables 4 and 5 of the decasyllables, syllables 6 and 7 of the alexandrines), it does not go from there in the same way before the 16th century. Thus, and to take again the first towards Athalie which, in the near total of the treaties of metric, is used with this type as demonstration:

Yes, I come in his // temple to adore the Eternal

is a correctly built alexandrine, because the female syllable of temple is elided. On the other hand:

* Yes, I come in his // temple to request the Eternal

contravenes the traditional rules because it includes/understands a supernumerary syllable with the caesura. A caesura of this type is on the other hand current in the epic poetry of the Middle Ages (Chanson de geste), from where denomination of epic caesura which it receives sometimes. One occasionally finds such caesuras until in the early works of Clément Marot. In:

* I come in his // temple to request the Eternal

quite as faulty according to the traditional rules because the female syllable, not-elided, coincides with the caesura, one could speak about lyric caesura . This caesura is indeed current among the trouveres, and lyric poets who succeed to them, at least until Charles of Orleans. Lastly, in:

* Yes, I come in his tem//ple to request the Eternal

also impossible in traditional versification because the syllable which follows the caesura female and not-is elided, one will be able to recognize a spanning caesura or Italian , caesura which appears only by accident in French medieval poetry.

External bonds

Olivier Bettens, Of the Turold bridge to the wall Thibaut: Junction and disjunction with the caesura in the French medieval decasyllable. http://virga.org/cvf/pontturo.php

Print

In Typography, the caesura is the operation which consists in cutting at the end of the line a word which would not enter the Justification. This “cut” obeys quite precise rules which vary from one language to another. The majority of the Software S of Word processing and Page layout S comprise such a program of caesura.

Rules

The mark of this caesura is the Hyphen, which one places at the end of the line but not at the beginning. For example:

and still, I do not speak there about neck

pure but about division.

It is recommended to avoid carrying out more than three successive caesuras. The caesura, moreover, concerns certain rules in order to avoid unhappy caesuras. One avoids, for example, to leave only two characters in beginning or end of line. The sequence of caesura is carried out according to syllabic cutting , while trying if possible to cut between radical prefixes and . The rules of caesuras will thus not be the same ones in Castillan, for example, whose syllabication follows other constraints. The majority of the Software S of Word processing and page layout comprise an automatic program of caesura adapting to the language of the text.

One will avoid also the unhappy caesuras such as those which would leave a idiot or a bottom at the end of the line - this rule being described in eloquent terms by the words concuvit or concubite .

For the derived words with Affix S, one will initially think of carrying out the caesura with the junction of the Lexème of the affixes in question:

transaction
cis-alpine
homogeneous atmosphere
antigen

In the made up words using the hyphen already, the only possible cut is with the hyphen itself:

porte-monnaie
robin

Data processing

The character Unicode U+00AD is a conditional hyphen making it possible to indicate the site of a possible caesura in a mot. In HTML, this character can be indicated by the Entité of character & shy; . The defective support of this character by the Web navigators does not allow however its use.

The name shy is an acronym for S oft hy phenation in English; it is also a Retro-acronym, since shy means “timid”. However, the “conditional” hyphen can be named discretionary hyphen , “hyphen discrétionnaire”, which evokes discrete . It is the discrete hyphen, which hides.

Examples of caesuras

The minus sign (-) indicates the authorized caesura, the bar of fraction (/) indicates the prohibited caesura:

syl-the-Bi/that

One avoids the formation of the word that at the beginning of line.

in/con/sis-such an amount of

One avoids in reduced to two letters at the end of the line, like … idiot at the end of the line.

cul/tu/re

One avoids bottom like two letters, Re at the beginning of line.

juice-these-si/ve
pro-to-ty/pe

One avoids leaving two letters - EP at the beginning of line, and cutting the prefix proto- if possible (but it is not prohibited).

Anecdotes

the typographers announce that there exists in French a word which must be crossed differently according to its direction (it is more exactly about the same C-W communication of two distinct words, not of two meanings of the same word): Malayan cuts in Malayan if it indicates a state of momentary nuisance, but in Malayan if it is a question of nominating a person originating in Malaysia.

the German eszett (single character ß resembling the greque letter béta) is cut in S, which put in failure several " exits" word processing towards external programs of cut (let us add-ons). The interfaces provided by no means that one could return a greater number of signs to them after cut (except the indent) that provided before cut!

There exists a program of cut that one forever succeeded in taking at fault even by subjecting important volumes (several years of the Dispatch of the South ) and very difficult cases to him: that of Maurice Girod , engineer of the IBM company and inventor of initials CAM ( desktop publishing ) in 1976, for software (disappeared today) ATMS. However, its complexity does that this one taken again forever for other machines, because it was coded in Assembleur 360, was programmed way not structured… and not documented.

See too

Alexandrine;
Towards;
List of the articles concerning the typography.

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