PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 271 



gent the printed opinions of the learned may sound, that the relative facts are 

 exactly the same in the case of spoken speech, as of song or played notes, is 

 beyond question. A single example will make this evident. The first syllable 

 of po' -tent, for instance, according to a well-known rule in the English language 

 is long ; but the first syllable of the Latin word from which the English comes 

 is short, pot' -ens, while the accent is on the same syllable in both languages. 

 Now, it surely will not be alleged, in obedience to the dictates of any sane ear, 

 that in pronouncing the Latin word I am obliged to call it pb'-tens, after the 

 English fashion, on account of the tyrannic force of the acute accent. It seems, 

 nevertheless, that British schoolmasters and professors have acted under the 

 notion that some compulsion of this kind exists ; for as a rule they say bo'-nus, 

 and not Ion' -us, though they know very well that the first syllable of this word is 

 not long, as in the English word po'-tion, but short, as in mor'-al. Such confusion 

 of ideas on a very simple matter is a phenomenon so strange, that some reason 

 may justly be demanded for its existence ; and on reflection I find two reasons 

 principally that seem to account for it. The first is the confounding of a really 

 long quantity with that predominance of a sound to the ear which is a necessary 

 element of all accentuation. Thus, when I take the word tep'-id, and form the 

 abstract substantive from it — tepid'-ity, by changing the place of the accent from 

 the first syllable of the adjective to the second, I certainly have given a pro- 

 minence to the short i which it did not possess before, and a prominence, no 

 doubt, which though it consists principally in force, emphasis, or stress, may 

 also carry along with it a certain dilatation of the tenuous vowel, so that it is 

 really longer in the substantive, being accented, than when it was slurred over 

 without emphasis in the adjective. But though this is quite true, it is altogether 

 false to say that the vowel has been made long according to the comparative 

 value of prosodial quantity ; for, if the second syllable of tepl'd-ity be compared, 

 not with the last syllable of the adjective tepid, but with the same syllable of 

 the substantive, as mispronounced by some slow, deliberate Scot — tepi-dity, 

 tepee-dity — we shall see that the vowel i, for all rhythmical purposes, still remains 

 short. The other cause which presents itself to explain the confusion of 

 English ears on this subject, is the doctrine of what the Greek and Roman 

 grammarians call length by position. According to this doctrine, a vowel 

 before two consonants is long. What this means we may clearly conceive by 

 the example of such words as gold, ghost, in English, or Ptibst or Obst in German ; 

 but though the vowels in these words are unquestionably long in both 

 languages, they are so only exceptionally, the rule both in English and German 

 being that a vowel before two consonants is short. Of this rule the word 

 shoi't itself may be taken as an excellent example ; which, if it occurred in a 

 Greek chorus, by the law of position, would be sung short, with the o prolonged, 

 like o in shore. Now, with this classical analogy in their ears, or rather in their 



