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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

THE ACCENT.   159

with vowels of imperfect formation, and even where no vowel is written, are sometimes found to be accentuated ones.

By the gradual modifications of modern languages the accent has become far more prominent than the quantity. The accent more generally falls upon the long vowels, or diphthongs ; the circumstance of their representing contracted vowels being in favour of the usage. In diphthongs I put the sign of the accent over the first vowel, even if it is in the antepenult, not, as in Greek, over the second; the latter is quite against the laws of acoustics, a diphthong pronounced with the second part accentuated becoming at once decomposed. At the time when the accents were introduced into Greek most of the diphthongs had probably already ceased to be pronounced as such (as in modern Greek). Secondary accents we might have indicated, by the grave (in coincidence with its original meaning as an attenuated accent), but we did not find it necessary to introduce it, and this the less so as the position of this accent is often difficult to define.

In my Glossary, compound words also, when written with their several parts separated, have only the principle accent marked.

Limit to the receding of the accent.

The physical conditions connected with the duration of the expiration and muscular stress limit the number of unaccentuated syllables following the accentuated one in the same word, and are the same for all languages. The grammatical and practical laws are somewhat different in the various languages, but looked at from a general point of view, they show a surprising resemblance. In Sanskrit,' it is generally said, any syllable, independently of its distance from the end, may be pronounced with the principal stress ; bùt this does not exclude the physical necessity of audible secondary intonations in long words, and these secondary accents we always heard when such Sanskrit words were pronounced before us, even by such Indian natives as were well acquainted with the theory, that intonation in Sanskrit should have no limited terminal distance.'-

Bopp, Vergleichendes Accentuationssystem, Berlin, 1854. The Svârita (or Nachton), so well defined by Bopp, as a participation in the accent by the syllable following the one pronounced with the principal stress, is in its nature quite unconnected with what I detail here as secondary accent.

2 In German also compound words of unusual length may have the principal accent on any syllable, though in these cases the secondary accent is also distinctly heard.