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Hiatus Avoidance And Metrification In The Rigveda, Dieter C. Gunkel, Kevin Ryan

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Using new corpus resources for Rigvedic poetics, we address various aspects of the poets' treatment of vowel hiatus and pre-vocalic shortening (correption), including their strategies for avoidance of these phenomena in certain contexts. Using observed vs. expected tests, we demonstrate, for one, that hiatus avoidance is correlated with degree of metrical-prosodic juncture. For example, hiatus is actively avoided both at the caesura in trimeter verse and between padãs, but its avoidance is weaker in the latter case. In conducting these tests, we control for a confound (interference) from pre-vocalic shortening, which requires us to address the problem of whether it …