Having no high passion
Do not spare for the sounds of life, He couldn't have iamba from a chorea, No matter how we fought, to distinguish,”says A. S. Pushkin about his hero. And then there is - anapest, amphibrachium, dactyl …
Poems and the science of versification
Who does not write poetry, or, in any case, who did not try to write them, especially in adolescence. This business is considered accessible to everyone - just catch inspiration! At the same time, few people think about the technique and laws of the most complex kind of art, delve into the theory of versification. It's strange: when asked to play something on the piano, for example, an ignorant person immediately answers: "I can't." They write poems and even publish their "verses" with much less ceremony.
Dactyl as a poetic meter
As a poetic meter, dactyl, being a Greek word in origin, was originally used in ancient poetry. It was a four-dimensional foot of one long and two subsequent short syllables. The size got its name from the similarity in structure to the human finger, in which the first joint is longer than the rest.
Five dactyls and one spondeus or trochee at the end of the verse - was the most common size of the poetic works of Ancient Greece of those times and was called a hexameter. It is also called the "heroic" hexameter. It was he who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey, and other works of the heroic epic.
In Russian, vowel length is not a phonologically significant element. Therefore, dactyl in Russian versification is a foot of the first stressed and the next two unstressed syllables. This is how it looks and sounds in the translation of N. I. Gnedich to the Russian syllabo-tonic rhythm Homer's Iliad with the obligatory middle caesura (pause):
Gnev, oh goddess, sing || Achilles, Peleev's son …
Attempts to introduce antique dactyl into Russian versification did not receive support and distribution. The most popular sizes were in the 18th century two-foot syllabo-tonic dactyl, in the 19th century - three and four feet.
Clouds are heavenly, eternal strangers (M. Yu. Lermontov).
Dactyl in other meanings
Translated from Greek, the word "dactyl" (daktylos) is translated as a finger. There was an ancient measure of length: dactyl, an analogue of the Russian span (middle finger width), equal to 18.5 mm.
In ancient Greek mythology, dactyls were called divine creatures-Lilliputians who lived on the island of Crete on Mount Ida. They emerged from the fingers of the great mother of the gods Rhea sunk into the ground during her prenatal labor.
Being part of compound words and meaning "related to fingers", "daktylos" is included in concepts such as: fingerprinting (writing with a finger), fingerprinting (forensic science), fingerprinting (finger language of the deaf).