In all Latin or Greek words which we import into English, so long as we feel them to be foreign, we adhere to the Latin rules of accentuation as well as we know how : thus, in democrat, demo criicy, dmocrcitical; phildsOphy, philosophical; astre minty, astrondinical; domestic, domesticity, domesti cation; possible, pOssibility; barbarous, barbarity. But the moment we treat any of these words as natives, we follow our own rule of keeping the accent on the radical syllable ; as in beirbannesness, where the Saxon ending, ness, is attached to the foreign word. With the growth of the language, we become more and more accustomed to hear a long train of syllables following the accent. Thus, we have comfit, comfortable, comfortableness ; par liament, parliamentary, which used to be parlia mentary.
In many provinces of England, and in particular families, the older and better pronunciations, con trag, industry, keep their place instead of the modem contrary, industry. The new tendency has innovated in Latin words so far, that many persons say inimical, contemplate, inculcate, decor ous, sonorous, and even concordance, for inimical, contemplate, etc. 'Alexander has supplanted 'Alex ander. In the cases of concordance, clamorous, and various others, it is probable that the words have been made to follow the pronunciation of concord, clamor, as in native English derivatives. The principle of change, to which we have been pointing, is probably deep-seated in human speech; for the later Attics are stated to have made a similar innovation in various words ; for example, zEschylus and Thucydides said Oados, rporaiop, but Plato and Aristotle, 6uotas, rphraloy.
If the principal accent is very distant from one end of a long word, a great obscurity in the distant vowel-sounds results, which renders a word highly unmusical, and quite unmanageable to poetry. This will be seen in such pronunciations as parlia mentary, peremptorily.
In Hebrew the same phenomenon is exhibited in a contrary way, the early vowels of a word being apt to become extremely short, in consequence of the accent being delayed to the end. Thus, enit, a tent, pl. ohdrf'm; ,• T: they killed; ;n:fpnp, pitaltihu, they killed him.
Oratorical reasons occasionally induce a sacrifice of the legitimate vocabular accent. In English this happens chiefly in cases of antithesis; as when the verbs, which would ordinarily be sounded incn'ase and decredse, reverse their accent in order to bring out more clearly the contrasted syllables ; ' He must increase, but I must &crease.'
This change is intended, not for mere euphony, but to assist the meaning. Variety and energy seem to he aimed at in the following Hebrew ex ample, which Ewald has noticed, and which seems to indicate that more of the same sort must remain to be discovered : .7udges v. 12, Uzi, DebOrd clabbiri shir; which, after Ewald, we may imitate by translating thus, Up then, up then, Deborah : up then, up then, utter a song.' The Greek and Hebrew languages, moreover, in the bause of a sentence, modified the accent without reference to the meaning of the words. Thus the verb ordinarily sounded )91a, gade'lli, with a very short penultimate vowel, becomes at the end of the sentence 111B, gaa'au, with a long and accented penultima (See Ewald's Hebrew Gnzut. § 131, 133). The Greek language also at the end of a sentence changes a flat accent into a sharp one ; for instance, the word rnt.i7 (honour) before a pause becomes rti.o); but no elongation of vowels ever accompanies this phenomenon.
Accent in Compound Words.—It is principally by the accent that the syllables of a word are joined into a single whole ; and on this account a language with well-defined accentuation is (caeteris paribus) so much the easier to be understood when heard, as well as so much the more musical. This function of the accent is distinctly perceived by us in such words of our language as have no other organized union of their parts. To the eye of a foreigner reading an English book, steam-boat ap pears like two words ; especially as our printers have an extreme dislike of hyphens, and omit them whenever the corrector of the press will allow it. In Greek or Persian two such words would be united into one by a vowel of union, which is cer tainly highly conducive to euphony, and the com pound would appear in the form steamiboat or steamobStos. As we are quite destitute of such apparatus (in spite of a few such exceptions as handicraft, mountebank), the accent is eminently important ; by which it is heard at once that steam boat is a single word. In fact, we thus distinguish between a stbnebox and a stone box; the former meaning a box for holding stones, the latter a box made of stone. Mr. Latham (Engl. Language, 234) has ingeniously remarked that we may read the following line from Ben Jonson in two ways : An'd thy silvershining or, An'd thy silver shining quiver'— with a slight difference of sense.