PLACE AND POWER OF ACCENT IN LANGUAGE. 283 



ing of prose included quantity also, is evident from what the same grammarian 

 says a sentence or two below, viz., that under irpoo-G&la, in a wider sense we 

 understand both accent and quantity, and in this wider sense correct prosodial 

 reading arises e/c tov Trapa^vXarreiv tou? tovovs koll tov<; ypovows, from observing 

 the tones and the times, and all the other affections of articulate speech. Now, 

 as there was an uninterrupted succession of grammatical teachers, from the age 

 of the Alexandrian Ptolemies to the time of the Roman Emperors, and from the 

 establishment of the Eastern Empire by Constantine to the taking of Constan- 

 tinople by the Turks, no historical fact can be more certain than this, that the 

 living accentuation with which Greek was spoken in the great seats of learning 

 and culture in the third century before Christ, and by which a just ortheopy in 

 reading was determined, has been handed down to us in an unbroken chain of 

 the most authoritative testimony. If this is not true, there is nothing now 

 credited in the wide sphere of linguistic tradition that rests on a surer basis. 



If, then, the ancient Greeks both spoke and read by the rule of those 

 accents which we now see on our printed books, what are we to understand by 

 that accent ? Now, here the field of definition is happily well narrowed. That 

 Greek accent did not mean quantity, every page of tradition on the subject 

 distinctly testifies ; that it did not mean mere volume of mass of articulate 

 sound is equally certain ; and no man, ancient or modern, ever dreamt that it 

 did. There remain, therefore, under which it may fall to be subsumed, only 

 the other two affections of articulate speech with which we started, viz., eleva- 

 tion of tone and intensity of utterance. Greek accent must be either the one 

 or the other of these, or both together. That it means the first, viz., elevation 

 of tone, is plain from the mere terms ofus and /3apu<?, sharp and heavy, or high 

 and low, by which the two familiar accents are designated. It is also distinctly 

 stated by both Greek and Roman grammarians that accent implies change of 

 tone in the voice, by alternate elevation and depression. The phraseology, 

 indeed, of this matter was borrowed by the grammarians from the musicians, 

 and had reference to the high and low notes in the musical scale, these minute 

 speculators having justly observed that, as the voice in music rises or falls by a 

 series of measured intervals, so in articulate speech it rises and falls by a suc- 

 cession of slides, what our great orthoepic teacher calls the rising and falling 

 inflexions. Either, therefore — the acute accent of the Greeks, which is the 

 accent properly so called — means the rising inflexion of the voice on particular 

 syllables of a word, or it means this, plus a stress or emphasis on a certain 

 syllable of a word, produced by the greater force, or stretch, or tension of 

 the voice on that particular syllable. Now that it does not mean elevation of 

 the voice merely, but also, and at the same time, that greater stretch or tension 

 of the voice which produces the emphatic syllable of a word, will, I think, be 

 evident from the following six considerations : — 



