Page:The Making of Latin.djvu/56

42 ph, th, ch in words borrowed from Greek) the student is referred to Messrs. Arnold and Conway’s Restored Pronunciation of Latin and Greek (Pitt Press) or to Messrs. Hale and Buck’s Latin Grammar (Messrs. Ginn and Co.). Something has been said of ph, th, ch in §§ 50 ff. above.

§ The rules which state the place of the Accent in Latin words in the time of Cicero are these:

(1) Monosyllables are accented, unless they are Enclitics like -que, -ve, or Proclitics (§ 68) like Prepositions which were pronounced in combination with the word which followed them; thus a phrase like in ménsam has only one accent.

Disyllabic Prepositions, however, retain an accent of their own, though it was generally a weaker accent than that of the word which followed: ínter hóstes had a stronger accent on the syllable hós- than on the syllable ín-.

(2) words were always accented on the first syllable, as mḗnsa, páter, ámat. Some disyllables, however, had become Enclitics like quoque, enim and generally mihi, tibi, sibi and some other pronominal forms; then they threw back their accent as in núnc-quoque, nṓn-enim, and often dī́c mihi.

(3) The only exceptions to the rule just stated are words which have lost a final syllable by elision, as in audī́n ‘do you hear?’ from audī́s-ne; these generally kept the Accent in the same place as it had held when the words were Trisyllabic. For viden see § 95.