THE TYPOLOGY AND ORIGIN OF ACCENTUAL VERSE

M of the earliest surviving verse texts in the languages of the Iberian Peninsula are syllabically irregular, but show clear signs of accentual regulation (see Cano 1931, Henriquez Urena 1933, and Duffell 1999b), and Rudolf Baehr argued that accentual verse probably predated syllabic in all the Romance languages (1973: 177). There are certainly a number of early poems in vulgar Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese that are more regular accentually than syllabically (see Du Meril 1843, Hills 1925, Hall 1965, Purzinsky 1965, Bayo 1999, Duffell 2002, and Parkinson in press). Perhaps this is not surprising, since the Romance languages of Western Europe are direct descendants of Latin spoken by Germans, and early Germanic verse was accentual. For more than a century the structure of Germanic accentual verse has been the subject of extensive research and debate, to which recent advances in linguistics have added important new insights. Comparative metrists seeking an explanation of the earliest syllabically irregular Romance verse texts can benefi t from this progress, and the present article offers a synopsis of the current state of Old Germanic metrics. This will be preceded by an analysis of the rhythms that are found in verse, and will conclude with a critique of modern hypotheses regarding the relationship between different types of metre in various Indo-European languages.