ACCENT, a term used by the earlier Greek grammarians for the musical accent which characterized their own language, but later the term became specialized for quantity in metre, whence comes the Eng. prosody (Lat. accentus, a literal transla tion of Gr. In all languages there are two kinds of accent : (I) musical chromatic or pitch accent ; (2) emphatic or stress accent. The former indicates differences in musical pitch between one sound and another in speech, the latter the difference between one syllable and another which is occasioned by emitting the breath in the production of one syllable with greater energy than is employed for the other syllables of the same word. These two senses are different from the common usage of the word in the statement that someone talks with a foreign or with a vulgar accent.
In different languages the relations between pitch and stress differ very greatly. The pitch accent is well-marked, for example in Lithuanian and Swedish. Modern Greek has changed from pitch to stress, the stress being generally laid upon the same syllable in modern as bore the pitch accent in ancient Greek. In the majority of European languages, however, stress is more con spicuous than pitch. To the existence of stress in the original language from which Greek, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic and other languages of Europe are descended, must be attributed a large part of the phenomena known as ablaut or gradation. In modern languages we get Acton out of the O.E. dc-tun (oak-town), and more recently the contrast between New Town and Newton. The strong stress accent existing in the transition period between Latin and French led to the curtailing of long Latin words like latrocinium or hospitcile into the words which we have borrowed from French into English as larceny and hotel.
In both pitch and stress accent different gradations may be observed. In pitch, the accent may be uniform, rising or falling. Or there may be combinations of rising and falling or of falling and rising accents upon the same syllable. In ancient Greek there were (I) the acute ('), a rising accent; (2) the grave ( `), appar ently merely the indication that in particular positions in the sentence the acute accent is not used where it would occur in the isolated word ; and (3) the circumflex, which, as its form ( ) shows, and as ancient grammarians state, combines the rising and the fall ing accent upon the same syllable, this syllable being always long. Different Greek dialects varied the syllables of the word : in historical times the accent had become limited to the last three syllables of a word. The theory that, as every vowel has its own natural pitch, and a frequent interchange between e (a high vowel) and o (a low vowel) occurs in the Indo-European languages, e originally went with the highest pitch accent, while o appeared in syllables of a lower pitch, has no certain foundation, as there are many exceptions. Somewhat similar distinctions characterize stressed syllables. According as the strength of the expiration is greatest either at the beginning, the end or the middle of the syllable, the accent is a falling, a rising, or a rising and falling one. Syllables in which the stress is produced continu ously whether increasing or decreasing are called single-pointed, those in which a variation in the stress occurs without being strong enough to break the syllable into two are called double-pointed. There is no separate notation for stress accent, but the acute (') is used for the increasing, the grave ( ' ) for the decreasing stress, the circumflex ( ^) for the rising and falling (increasing and decreasing) and ( ,) for the opposite. A separate notation is needed.
The relation between the two accents in the same language at the same time is a subject which requires further investigation. In prehistoric times the stress in Latin must have rested upon the first syllable in all cases. Only on this hypothesis can be explained forms like peperci (perfect of parco) and collido (a compound of laedo), for throughout the historical period the stress rested in these words upon the second syllable from the end.
Besides the accent of the syllable and of the word, there re mains a more complicated problem, the accent of the sentence. From earliest times some words have become parasitic or enclitic upon other words. Pronouns more than most words are modified from this cause, but conjunctions like the Gr. TE ("and"), the Lat. que, have throughout their whole history been enclitic upon the preceding word. A very important word may be enclitic, as in English don't, shan't.