@caedrons
see i'm curious what the use of iambic pentameter there could suggest about tevene lexical stress; it's probably just there because the poem is actually written in english, but i wonder what it would be in tevene, yknow?
Mh, wild speculation time.
If we suppose that Tevene = fake Latin, we could draw some comparisons, but we also know that Ancient Tevene is a thing that Dorian can’t understand, it’s a dialect no longer spoken (I’m not even gonna get into speculations about Tevene now, it’s been done before and I’m just gonna link that instead), and that the trade tongue/common is a Tevinter’s first language, that is canon.
But also: that is a sonnet, and the sonnet is a form of poetry that in the real world first developed in Italy. Now I’m not especially a fan of equating Thedas’ countries to irl countries, at least not like verbatim, but it’s still pretty evident which is the real life counterpart/main inspiration. So Tevinter is the Roman Empire but Italy (and... Spain mixed together, I suppose) is Antiva.
At this point we can say that this Magister Oratius is using an Antivan form of poetry and actually writing in common, rather than in Tevene. Common/trade is, by the way, the dwarven language, literally. At which point we might infer that dwarven (Orzammar dialect?) uses stress patterns in poetry like English does, and... just retain the possibility that the sonnet is, in fact, written in iambic pentametre even in its “original” form.
On the other side, we can also say that Magister Oratius wanted to be fancy and used Tevene instead (and Tevene is associated to the upper classes, even if it’s, to varying degrees, used by every Tevinter citizen). Maybe classical Tevene, instead of vulgar Tevene (a dialect speculation that comes from that post I linked). At that point, if Tevene=fake Latin, I could hazard that the sonnet that in English is in iambic pentametre could take the form of a iambic elegy. Iambic metre in its various forms is, after all, very common in classical poetry. Or maybe might simply be a hybrid: a sonnet in actual iambic pentametre, but written in Tevene.
That said, both Horatius (the actual Roman poet, not the magister) and Catullus used a iambic trimetre, with variations, and for the purpose of this speculation that might also be good enough.
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