century, the Swiss scholar Rudolf Thurneysen suggested that it had developed from the Latin hexameter. For there is a common type of hexameter which has two stresses in the first half and three in the second, for example: (Virgil, Aen. 9.697) "but Father Aeneas, when he heard the name of Turnus,..." or (Virgil, Aen. 6.268) "they were walking slowly, beneath the lonely night through the shadow" The 3rd-century Christian African writer Commodian, who wrote irregular hexameters in a popular style, favoured this kind with five word-accents. Thurneysen quotes: "do not be angry without cause at a devout brother; "for you will receive back from him whatever you have done" When the pronunciation of the Latin changed to French, the number of syllables in many words was reduced. For example, "she came running" changed in the vernacular pronunciation to , and "listen, sirs" with seven syllables changed to with four. Final syllables in French were particularly subject to being lost, unlike in Spanish and Italian. Another feature the accentual Latin hexameter has in common with iambic pentameter is that the position of the 1st and 3rd accents is not fixed; for example, the first accent can come either at the beginning of the verse or in second place, as in the pentameter. Early French and Provençal writers Possibly the earliest example of iambic pentameter verse is the poem Boecis ("Boethius"), written in the Occitan dialect of the Limousin region in southern France about 1000 AD. An example is the following extract: "Beautiful is the lady, and her face is so bright, before her face, no man can hide himself; not even those men, who are beyond the sea." In this metre, every line has two halves: the first half of the line has four syllables, but sometimes after the 4th syllable an extra unaccented syllable is added, as in lines 1 and 3 above; the second half has six syllables. This optional extra syllable in the middle of the line, as well as an extra unaccented syllable at the end of the line, are also seen in the 11th-century French poem, , of which an extract is as follows (see :fr:Vie de saint Alexis): "Of the grief, which the father was showing, great was the noise; the mother heard it; she came running, like a frenzied woman, beating her palms, crying, dishevelled, sees her son dead; falls fainting to the ground."