32 BROOMALL : 



lable felt by the speaker to be chiefly significant. This law 

 is so fundamental that it may temporarily change the syllabic 

 accent where the significance of contrast or antithesis is 

 emphatic, as in " this in'creases and that de' creases," although 

 either word used alone would have the accent on the second 

 syllable. Again, a root or stem syllable, now of little if any 

 significance in itself and used only in composition, may 

 retain this accent because the syllables around it are recog- 

 nized as prefixes and suffixes. Thus, no modern English 

 speaker thinks of the syllable gi7i as significant, yet in begin- 

 nhig he retains the accent on that syllable because be is a 

 prefix and ing a suffix. 



Where the word is polysyllabic, with no syllable, signifi- 

 cant as above set forth to hold or reject the accent, the English 

 speaker tends to throw the accent toward the beginning of 

 the word. He says ab'domen for abdo men, with the diction- 

 ary's consent, and in'qidry for inqiii'ry without it. The lexi- 

 cographer knows that in in inquiry is a prefix and resists the 

 change of accent. Logically enough, he wishes to preserve 

 the accent on the significant stem — significant in the lan- 

 guage from which the word is adopted. The speaker, how- 

 ever, does not recognize any particular syllable as stem or 

 affix, and the phonetic law has full play, producing in'qidry 

 just as it has already produced in jury instead of iyiju'ry. 



The shift of accent from one syllable to another is partic- 

 ularly observable in words adopted from another language 

 where the general accentual law is different from English. 

 With us, the adopted word is a whole, the syllables not separ- 

 ably significant, and if the word comes to play a valuable 

 part in our speech, its naturalization with us is confirmed by 

 its accordance with our accentual law. Thus madame' is 

 French ; mad' aviie) is English. 



In our own hereditary Teutonic words the shift of accent 

 taking place at any given period is limited to a few words 

 because the conditions we have described have been operative 

 so long that most of our words have undergone the change. 



