292 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



do not in the slightest degree affect the question ; they do not exist in English 

 books, and yet English words have a well-known accent in the voice of the 

 English people, and as made visible artificially to the eye in the pronouncing 

 dictionaries of Walker and other orthoepists. The next great error made by 

 Hennin lies in the theory — for it is a mere baseless theory — that the accents were 

 invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, for some purpose quite different for that 

 which they now subserve. This is simply to leap over the testimonies of the 

 most learned Greek grammarians from the time of the Alexandrian scholars to 

 the taking of Constantinople by the Turks. And in order to make such a 

 hypothesis possible and even plausible, he draws a flaming picture of the 

 barbarism which corrupted the Greek language at a fever pace from the 

 Roman to the Turkish conquest. All this, however, is purely imaginary, as any 

 person who has looked even superficially into Byzantine literature must con- 

 fess. Whatever changes in the course of time naturally might take place in 

 the spoken language of the Greeks, the last element that would be touched by 

 the change was the accentuation ; and that not only from its own natural 

 obstinacy, but from the very fact that the proper place of the accent visible in 

 most written books presented a stereotyped norm, that checked all arbitrary 

 deflexion in the start. Any other arguments that make a parade in Hennin's 

 book are based on the fact of which we hear so much in these days, that certain 

 persons could not pronounce avOpoi-rros without saying avOpoTros, and certain 

 other persons imagined that it was impossible to do so. After overleaping 

 heroically the bristling fence of historic testimony on the matter, the author 

 proceeds to lay down four rules of accentuation, which, both in the Greek and 

 Latin languages are, " sine alld exceptione ceternce veritatis" These rules are 

 as follows : — 



(I.) " Omnis vox monosyllaba modulationem habet in sua vocali ut 0&Js, vov%, 

 mons, pons." 



(II.) Omnis vox dissyllaba modulationem habet in syllabd priori, ut Xo'yoi, 



OOOL, <p(t)V7]. 



III. " Omnis vox polysyttaba penultimam longam modulatur ut avOpco-rros 

 TVTTTcoixev, Grcecorum, jucunda, Romanorum. " 



IV. " Omnis vox polysyllaba, penidtima brevi, modulatur antepenidtimam ut 

 d6minas, dXoyov." 



This is certainly one of the most cool pieces of insolent one-sided dogmatism 

 that the history of learning presents, the whole affair being simply an assertion 

 that the particular method of accentuation in the Latin language, which the 

 author had inherited from secular and ecclesiastical Rome, should be stilted up 

 into an eternal norm of accentuation for all languages, while the most plain and 

 obvious facts, both in ancient Greek and modern English, which contradict the 

 theory are held as non-existent, and excluded from the calculation ; an instructive 



