Eduard Sievers (25 November 1850, Lippoldsberg - 30 March 1932, Leipzig) was a German philologist, of the classical and Germanic languages. November 25 is the 329th (in leap years the 330th) day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1850 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... March 30 is the 89th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (90th in leap years). ... 1932 (MCMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link will take you to a full 1932 calendar). ... [] (Sorbian/Lusatian: Lipsk) is the largest city in the Federal State (Bundesland) of Saxony in Germany. ... Philology is the study of ancient texts and languages. ...

Eduard Sievers was one of the Junggrammatiker of the so-called Leipzig School. He was one of the most influential historical linguists of the late nineteenth century, and is best known for his recovery of the poetic traditions of Germanic languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Old Saxon. The Neogrammarians (also Young Grammarians, German Junggrammatiker) were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change. ... For Leipzig School see Leipzig school (sociology) Junggrammatiker Categories: | ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is a Germanic language. ...

Sievers' analysis was a system of five patterns which indicated how the poetic line (or, more specifically, the poetic half-line) was to be emphasized or unemphasized, e.g. stressed-unstressed-stressed-unstressed, unstressed-stressed-unstressed-stressed, etc. This seemingly elementary analysis was significant because of the difficulty experienced by previous scholars in identifying where the poetic line began and ended. Germanic poetry, in its written form, rarely indicated the line division. Eduard Sievers developed a theory of the meter of Anglo-Saxon Alliterative verse. ... In Euclidean geometry, a ray, or half-line, given two distinct points A (the origin) and B on the ray, is set of points C on the line containing points A and B such that A is not strictly between C and B. O----O-----*---> A B C In geometric...

Moreover, even though it was clear that some words were of greater importance than others and were thus supposed to be stressed, there were few limitations on the length of the unstressed sequences, which made the identification of the poetic line even more difficult. In Shakespearean verse, for example, a typical poetic line is:

It IS the EAST and JUliET’s the SUN

Here stressed and unstressed syllables follow one after the other. In Old Saxon, however, a line might read:

LIthi an thesaru LOGnu

In this example, five syllables occur between the stressed syllables LI- and LOG.

Sievers examined these issues in great detail, as well as the questions of relative stress and clashing stresses in poetry.

Although his analysis was widely (though not universally) accepted among philologists, Sievers himself later abandoned it in favor of Schallanalyse, or 'sound analysis,' a system which was understood by very few apart from Sievers and those close to him. Schallanalyse (pronounced [ʃal analyzə]), that is, sound analysis, was a method of poetic analysis developed by the renowned philologist Eduard Sievers. ...

Sievers’s work on the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon poetry influenced the poetry of Ezra Pound^[1] Ezra Pound in 1913. ...

Notes

1. ↑  Brooke-Rose, Christine: A ZBC of Ezra Pound (Faber and Faber, 1971) page 88.

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose (born January 16, 1923) is a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. ... A ZBC of Ezra Pound (ISBN 0-571-091350) is a book by Christine Brooke-Rose published by Faber and Faber in 1971. ...

External link

• [2] (German language)