Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/69

 II. JULY 23, '98.3 NOTES AND QUERIES.

61

LONDON, SATURDAY, JULY 23, 1898.

CONTENTS. -No. 30.

NOTES: On Accent, 61 Ancient Zodiacs, 62 Crypto- grams, 63 " Wishy-washy " "Go about" "Tommy Atkins, "64 Col. Dalbiac's ' Dictionary of Quotations' The Printer Again Historic Stones at the Royal Exchange, 65 Sbipton Parish Registers' Comin' thro' the Rye ' Book- Borrowing " Solamen miseris," &c. ' The Birds of Ciren- cester,' 66.

QUERIES: "Whose curtain never outward swings" Lords Lieutenant" Uno avulso," &c. M.P. and Statue of Gold Upham Spade Guinea Child's Hymn Ham- lake = Helmsley, 67 The Septuagint ' Kilmarnock Mirror' "Whitsul" "Come, lasses and lads," &c. Picture Marks, 68 Rev. S. Rogers Johnson Thoroton Gould's Marriage The Six Clerks in Chancery Duchess of Kendal Authors wanted, 69.

REPLIES : " Strenua nos exercet inertia" " To Sue," 70 Johnson's Residence in Bolt Court, 71 Gladstone as a Verse- Writer Source of Quotation Malcolm Hamilton, 72 " Down to the ground " Patches San Lanfranco, 73 Charles III. Beards Christian Names " Choriasmus,' 74 Horace Walpole Bishop Ezekiel Hopkins" Flam" The Mauthe Doog The Greek Church in Soho Massage, 75 Titles of Pictures Oakapple Day Pickwickian Manners Stonyhurst Cricket, 76 "Buried for truth" Short a v. Italian a" Campus "Stolen Relics Restored, 77 Miles Stan dish's Wife Reference Wanted James Cox's Museum "Tiger" Arms of Slane Port Arthur Branding Prisoners The "Scouring" of Land Authors Wanted, 78.

NOTES on BOOKS : Murray's 'Historical English Dic- tionary ' Weaver and Bates's ' Index to Collinson's His- tory of Somerset' Rye's ' Church and Parish of Cawston ' Macmillan and Brydall's ' lona' 'Journal of the Ex- Libris Society ' ' The Reliquary.'

Notices to Correspondents.

ON ACCENT.

A BOOK as interesting as useful might be written upon the subject of the accentual laws of different languages, but so far as I know there is nothing of the sort in English. The one writer who has ventured upon this delicate ground is, I think, the late A. J. Ellis, and he only in a short section of his long article on 'Speech Sounds' in the ' Encyclopedia Britannica.' As this is now somewhat out of date, containing at any rate serious errors, I purpose pointing out these and adding a few notes of my own touching this most important and much neglected topic.

The different kinds of accent may be classed under three chief heads, as follows, and if anybody desires to know of a language which unites them all, I may suggest that such a language is the Greek. In England it is accented according to quantity ; in Greece in ancient times the musical accent prevailed, for which the modern Greeks have substi- tuted the stress.

1. The quantitative is the first kind of accent, and Ellis names as instances the Indian, Arabic, and Persian tongues. What he means by Indian I do not know ; it is a term singularly vague to come from the pen

of so precise a writer. If it implies the modern Aryan vernaculars of India, it is quite true that they are accented quantitatively ; in the Gujerati and Marathi, however, as in Gipsy, we often meet with stressed final vowels. There is an admirable article on the subject, by Dr. Grierson, in the journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1895. Arabic is a better example better than Latin, because Arabic has been accented according to quan- tity from the beginning, whereas in Latin the quantitative accent is a development out of an earlier musical one. As to Persian, Ellis is wrong : altogether wrong according to the unanimous voice of the Persian gram- mars, which class Persian with Turkish so far as its accentuation is concerned ; partly wrong according to another authority, Dr. Trumpp, who says that the grammars are in error, and that Persian is quantitative as regards the accent of its nouns and adjec- tives, but not as regards its verbs. It will be perceived that there is some mystery as to the laws of accent in Persian ; there are two irreconcilable schools of teaching, but neither of them agrees with Ellis. Even if we side with the splendidly isolated Trumpp, we must admit that Persian, partly quantitative, stands on a footing widely different from Arabic, which is quantitative throughout.

2. Of the second or musical accent the instances given are the Sanscrit, Latin, and ancient Greek, but these, it will be observed, are all dead, and their accent is more or less a matter of theory. It would surely have been better had Ellis mentioned Lithuanian or Serbo-Croatian, in which the original Aryan accent is accompanied by a heightening or lowering of pitch to the present day.

3. The third or stress accent is coupled by Ellis with the names of the Teutonic, Italian, and modern Greek. I have no complaint to make of these examples, but it would have been as well, side by side with the Teutonic family, which, as every one knows, throws the accent uniformly upon the first syllable, to have made some mention of languages which accent uniformly the final (the most familiar to the general reader will be French and the least so Armenian) or the penultimate (Welsh and Polish, Malay and Javanese, the Bantu dialects of Africa, Mexican and Peruvian). Sometimes there are interchanges between the final and penultimate ; thus in Brittany the dialect of Vannes accents the final, pos- sibly under the influence of French, while all other dialects accent the penultimate : but the most interesting case is that of Hebrew. Classically it preferred the final accent, and the Seventy in their Greek orthography of