Accents and Long Syllables

Latin Learning Latin
1

I used to think that the long syllable was the same thing as an accent, but now I’m just confused.

These are the facts (I think) I’ve managed to garner.

  1. The accent is most often on the long syllable.
  2. The accent is NOT the same thing as a long syllable.
  3. A word can have many long vowels, but only one of them will funtion as the “main” long vowel.
  4. The accent or long syllable will always be on the penult or antepenult, and never anything else.
  5. Somehow changing long syllables to short syllables and vice versa is significant in Latin poetry.

As I said, confused.

2

The accent is on the penult if it is long or if the word has only two syllables. Otherwise, it is on the antepenult.

A syllable is long if it contains a long vowel, a diphthong, or a vowel followed by two consonants.

That’s a paraphrase from M&F.

EDIT:
I should respond to your points more directly.

  1. The accent is most often on the long syllable.

It is always on one of the long syllables, unless the word has none. You have to use the rules above to determine which one.

  1. The accent is NOT the same thing as a long syllable.

That’s correct.

  1. A word can have many long vowels, but only one of them will funtion as the “main” long vowel.

If by main you mean the one that is accented, yes.

  1. The accent or long syllable will always be on the penult or antepenult, and never anything else.

Yes.

  1. Somehow changing long syllables to short syllables and vice versa is significant in Latin poetry.

I don’t know enough about Latin poetry, so I can’t say.

3

Look at A&G for an explanation on vowel length and quantity:

http://www.textkit.com/files/AG_New_Latin_Grammar.pdf#page=16

Ingrid

4
  1. The accent or long syllable will always be on the penult or antepenult, and never anything else.

Most often yes, but there are a few exceptions. Illuc, illic and some others have the accent on the last syllable. They used to be illuce and illice, and after the final e disappeared they were still accented in the same way.

5

I read that the accent was on the penult unless the penult was short, in which case the accent was on the antepenult.

6

The original word illice has three syllables, the double consonant l attached to the second long ‘i’: i-llī´-ce with accent falling normally on the antepenult, (i-LEE-keh). According to A+G, when the final vowel was lost (and with it the last syllable) the accent would have fallen normally on the first syllable, as there are only two syllables left in the mutated word. This would have resulted in a very different sounding word.

I wonder if this was the case with all words that lost a syllable due to the mutation and if it is peculiar to those which lose a final open vowel.

7

Thanks, ya’ll!

8

It also sometimes happens in compounds of the irregular imperatives (dic, duc, fac, fer); i.e. satisfac, maledic, benedic, calefac, etc.

9

Oh, so it’s satisfác etc.? That’s one I didn’t know about. :slight_smile:

10

But the one thing that still confuses me is the role of syllable length in poetry. It seems that the Romans weren’t conscious of /accent/ at all; syllable length was what determined the meter and stuff.

11

The original Roman poems, Saturnian metres, are thought to be based on accent. It was only after contact with the Greeks that they borrowed the practice of using syllable length to determine metre, which is perhaps not as well suited to Latin as it is to Greek. The accent would certainly have been apparent to Romans in the poetry, but it would not be the source of the rhythm.

12

::scribbles down notes:: How do you know so much?

13

But the one thing that still confuses me is the role of syllable length in poetry. It seems that the Romans weren’t conscious of /accent/ at all; syllable length was what determined the meter and stuff.

Syllable length is distinct from vowel length. A syllable with a long vowel or diphthong is always long, although if it comes at the end of a word it can be elided. A syllable with a short vowel is long if the syllable ends in a consonant. Generally clusters of two or more consonants are divided up so each syllable has one each. So “extollere” becomes “ex-tol-le-re” - two long and two short.

I think a nice short work - a couple of pages long - explaining how Roman meter works could be written by one of the bods here. I might try it myself, although I am hardly one to lecture others on the correct use of Latin.

There are, you see, quite a few rules which determine how composers of Latin verse put together their work.

-whether the second consonant in a cluster is liquid
-whether the word ends in a vowel, and is thus elided
-whether the word ends in “m”, and is also elided
-where the breaks in the words fall.

All these factors determine how the verse fits together.