Society for Pure English Tract 4 | Page 3

of words which have become part
of our language, it will be well to begin with a formulation of its rules.
The rule of Latin stress was observed as it obtained in the time of
Quintilian. In the earliest Latin the usage had been other, the stress
coming as early in the word as was possible. Down to the days of
Terence and probably somewhat later the old rule still held good of

quadrisyllables with the scansion of _m[)u]l[)i][)e]r[)i]s_ or
_m[)u]l[)i][)e]r[=e]s_, but in other words had given way to the later
Quintilian rule, that all words with a long unit as penultimate had the
stress on the vowel in that unit, while words of more than two syllables
with a short penultimate had the stress on the antepenultimate. I say
'unit' because here, as in scansion, what counts is not the syllable, but
the vowel plus all the consonants that come between it and the next
vowel. Thus _inférnus_, where the penultimate vowel is short, no less
than _suprémus_, where it is long, has the stress on the penultima. In
_volucris_, where the penultimate unit was short, as it was in prose and
could be in verse, the stress was on the _o_, but when ucr made a long
unit the stress comes on the _u_, though of course the vowel remains
short. In polysyllables there was a secondary stress on the alternate
vowels. Ignorance of this usage has made a present-day critic falsely
accuse Shakespeare of a false quantity in the line
Coríolánus in Coríoli.
It may be safely said that from the Reformation to the nineteenth
century no Englishman pronounced the last word otherwise than I have
written it. The author of the Pronouncing Dictionary attached to the
'Dictionary of Gardening' unfortunately instructs us to say _gládiolus_
on the ground that the i is short. The ground alleged, though true, is
irrelevant, and, although Terence would have pronounced it
_gládiolus_, Quintilian, like Cicero, would have said _gladíolus_. Mr.
Myles quotes Pliny for the word, but Pliny would no more have
thought of saying _gládiolus_ than we should now think of saying
'laboúr' except when we are reading Chaucer.
We need not here discuss the dubious exceptions to this rule, such as
words with an enclitic attached, e.g. _prim[)a]que_ in which some
authorities put the stress on the vowel which precedes the enclitic, or
such clipt words as 'illuc', where the stress may at one time have fallen
on the last vowel. In any case no English word is concerned.
In very long words the due alternation of stressed and unstressed
vowels was not easy to maintain. There was no difficulty in such a
combination as _hónoríficábilí_ or as _tudínitátibús_, but with the
halves put together there would be a tendency to say
_hónoríficabilitúdinitátibus_. Thus there ought not to be much
difficulty in saying _Cónstantínopólitáni_, whether you keep the long

antepenultima or shorten it after the English way; but he who forced the
reluctant word to end an hexameter must have had 'Constantinóple' in
his mind, and therefore said _Constántinópolitáni_ with two false
stresses. The result was an illicit lengthening of the second o. His other
false quantity, the shortening of the second _i_, was due to the English
pronunciation, the influence of such words as 'metropol[)i]tan', and, as
old schoolmasters used to put it, a neglect of the Gradus. Even when
the stress falls on this antepenultimate _i_, it is short in English speech.
Doubtless Milton shortened it in 'Areopagitica', just as English usage
made him lengthen the initial vowel of the word.
Probably very few of the Englishmen who used the traditional
pronunciation of Latin knew that they gave many different sounds to
each of the symbols or letters. Words which have been transported
bodily into English will provide examples under each head. It will be
understood that in the traditional pronunciation of Latin these words
were spoken exactly as they are spoken in the English of the present
day. For the sake of simplicity it may be allowed us to ignore some
distinctions rightly made by phoneticians. Thus the long initial vowel
of alias is not really the same as the long initial vowel of _area_, but
the two will be treated as identical. It will thus be possible to write of
only three kinds of vowels, long, short, and obscure.
The letter or symbol a stood for two long sounds, heard in the first
syllables of alias and of _larva_, for the short sound heard in the first
syllable of _stamina_, and for the obscure sound heard in the last
syllable of each of these last two words in English.
The letter e stood for the long sounds heard in genus and in _verbum_,
for the short sound heard in _item_, and for the obscure sound heard