PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 277 



of words whose terminations are dissyllabic. Thus, they dealt largely in final 

 trochees — trochees both by accent and quantity, in such words as sermb'nis, 

 penndrum, domino' rum, legis, probd'vit, voluptd'tem, and so forth, but could not 

 say domino's, or Macend's, or any word accented in the same way as in English 

 our engineer, volunteer, evdde, capsi'ze, theori'se. On the other hand, the Greek 

 terminational accent is pretty equally divided between trochaic terminations, 

 such as olo, <f>ikov<ri, TV(f>6ei(ra, [jivdos, cr<y//,a, jjlolWov, and oxytone endings, such 

 as ayadwv, \a/3a>v, Tv^deis, </>t\et9. Of the prevalence of the oxytone accent in 

 Greek, especially in large groups of adjectives and substantives, not to mention 

 the whole army of prepositions, and certain familiar parts of verbs, any one may 

 convince himself by taking a sentence at random from a Greek book ; and the 

 effect of this on the music of the sentence will be evident to the dullest ear. 

 Sometimes a whole sentence runs on with a succession of accented terminational 

 syllables, a peculiarity which, without any rhetorical intention, arises naturally 

 from the number of oxytone substantives and adjectives, and the additional 

 fact that all substantives of the first declension, whatever the accent of their 

 termination may be, receive a long rolling accent on the last syllable of the 

 genitive plural, while all monosyllables of the third declension, by a law common 

 both to Greek and Sanscrit, transfer the accent from the radical syllable to 

 the termination in the genitive and dative cases of both numbers. Take a 

 passage from Plato's Kepublic as an example : — 



" Ot re dyjpevTal iravTes, ol re p,ipjr)Toi, 7ro\\ot fxev ol irepl to. o-yr\p,wra. re /cat 

 Xpaj/xara, ttoWoI Se ol nepl jjLOvcriKrjv, iroirjTai re /cat tovtwv virripeTai, paxfjcoSoi, 

 vnoKpLTai, -^opevrai, ipyoXdfioi, o~Keva>v re TravTooawcop oyjjjLiovpyol, tcov re akXcov /cat 

 Tbtv wepl top yvvaiKeiov koct/jlov, /cat orj kgu oiaKOvoiv tt\^l6vu>v oerjo-ojJLeda. ^ ov So/cei 

 Serjcreiv Tra&ayaiywv, tltOoiv, Tpo(f>a>v, KOfx^oiTpLOiv, Kovpiav, /ecu av oxJjoitoiojv re /cat 

 jxayeipov ; £tl Se /cat o-v/3(i)Tcjv TrpocrSe^croue^a.""'" 



Greek, therefore, is superior to Latin in this respect, just as an instrument 

 with a larger is superior to one with a smaller compass of notes. And taking 

 Italian, under this point of view, into the comparison, we observe that the few 

 oxytone accents which that beautiful language possesses all arise out of Latin 

 words, with an accented penult, whose last syllable has fallen away; thus, 

 podestd from potestate, amo from amavit, and so forth. The same is the case 

 with the French, as in mlocite, variete, valetir ; and most of our English oxy- 

 tones, whether Latin or Greek, are merely curtailed forms of a final trochaic 

 accent, as evdde from evddo, volunteer from volontiefre, proceed from procefdo, 

 theorise from #ecopt£a>. And it is this systematic curtailment by the way, caused 

 by the dropping of the final unaccented vowel both in Latin and Saxon words, 

 which has produced that lamentable deficiency in trochaic endings which makes 

 our rhythmical language so much narrower in compass than that of Greek, 



* Eep. ii. 373, B. 

 VOL. XXVI. PART II. 4 C 



