Historical and Critical Remarks

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Excerpt from Historical and Critical Remarks: Introductory to a Comparative Study of Greek Accent Accent is a universal phenomenon in language, and one which is in close union with what is treated by grammar under the head of sound or phonology. The sounds of a word without accent are merely separate stones which accent cements into a linguistic entity, either a word or a sentence. W. V. Humboldt says : 'The unity of the word is produced by the accent. This, by itself, is of a more spiritual nature than the sounds, and it is therefore called the soul of speech, not only because it is really the element which carries intelligibility into speech, but because it is, more than other factors in speech, the immediate expression of feeling' (cited by Gottling, Accent der griechischen Sprache, p. 8). The word accent in modern terminology is unfortunately compelled to do duty for more than one linguistic fact. First, in the case of the word, it signifies the relative stress and pitch characteristics of its various syllables, with no restriction to that syllable which has the strongest stress or the highest pitch. This is the most scientific function of the word. A closer study of the life of the word cannot be satisfied with a theoretical analysis of its sounds and syllables and a superficial recognition as to which of the syllables has the highest pitch or strongest stress, but it must be known also in what way or to what extent this syllable is elevated above those surrounding it. This definition of accent has necessarily to be kept apart from that other more familiar one by which, in the current parlance of grammar, the pitch or stress of the most accented syllable is designated. This, of course, is not all. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.