481 Dr. Latham on the use of the Signs of Accent and Quantity 



inadvertence on these points should occur^ is not to be wondered 

 at. Professional grammarians — men who deal with the purely 

 philological questions of metre and syllabification — with few 

 exceptions, confound them. 



In English Latin (by which I mean Latin as pronounced by 

 Englishmen) there is, in practice, no such a thing as quantity ; 

 so that the sign by which it is denoted is, in nine cases out 

 of ten, superfluous. Mark the accent, and the quantity will take 

 care of itself. 



I say that there is no such a thing in English Latin as quan- 

 tity. I ought rather to have said that 



English quantities are not Latin quantities. 



In Latin, the length of the syllable is determined by the length 

 of the vowels and consonants combined. A long vowel, if followed 

 in the same word by another (i. e. if followed by no consonant), 

 is short. A short vowel, if followed by two consonants, is long. 

 In English, on the other hand, long vowels make long, whilst 

 short vowels make short, syllables ; so that the quantity of a 

 syllable in English is determined by the quantity of the vowel. 

 The i in jnus is short in Latin. In English it is long. The e 

 in mend is short in English, long in Latin. 



This, however, is not all. There is, besides, the following 

 metrical paradox. A syllable may be made long by the very 

 fact of its being short. It is the practice of the English lan- 

 guage to signify the shortness of a vowel by doubling the 

 consonant that follows. Hence we get such words as pitted, 

 knotty, massive, &c. — words in which no one considers that the 

 consonant is actually doubled. For do we not pronounce pitted 

 and pitied alike ? Consonants that appear double to the eye are 

 common enough. Really double consonants — consonants that 

 sound double to the ear — are rarities, occurring in one class of 

 words only — viz. in compounds whereof the first element ends 

 with the same sound with which the second begins, as soul-less, 

 book-case, &c. 



The doubling, then, of the consonant is a conventional mode 

 of expressing the shortness of the vowel that precedes, and it 

 addresses itself to the eye rather than the ear. 



But does it address itself to the eye only ? If it did, pitied 

 and pitted, being sounded alike, would also be of the same quan- 

 tity. We know, however, that to the English writer of Latin 

 verses they are not so. We know that the first is short {pitied), 

 the latter long (pitted). For all this, they are sounded alike : so 

 that the difference in quantity (which, as a metrical fact, really 

 exists) is, to a great degree, conventional. At any rate, we 

 arrive at it by a secondary process. We know how the word is 

 spelt ; and we know that certain modes of spelling give certain 



