In languages with quantitative poetic metres, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, and classical Persian, an anceps (plural ancipitia[1] or (syllabae) ancipites[2]) is a position in a metrical pattern which can be filled by either a long or a short syllable.
Martin West argues that this double anceps opening is a relic of an earlier period, also reflected in Sanskrit, when the beginning of a line of poetry had free scansion and only the end was fixed.
However, in other metres of Latin poetry, anceps syllables do not occur (except for the usual possibility of brevis in longo at the end of the line).
[13] Thus the meter khafīf (the most common metre used in Saadi's Golestān),[14] has the following form: In such verses, the anceps is long in about 80% of cases.
)[16] In Sanskrit, the classical language of ancient India, in the early period in some metres the first part of the line was very free.
For example, epic poems such as the Mahābhārata were mostly composed in a type of stanza known as the śloka, which developed from the vedic anuṣṭubh metre.
Another metre, the triṣṭubh, which is commonly used in the Rigveda, the earliest form of Sanskrit, has four 11-syllable lines of the following pattern (the symbol "," represents a caesura or break between words).
The anceps is distinct from brevis in longo, which refers to the phenomenon whereby a normally short syllable counts as long when used at the end of a line.