HANDBOOK

OF

LATIN INSCRIPTIONS.

CHAPTER I.

THE EARLIEST PERIOD AND THE BEGINNING OF LITERATURE.

1. Latin belongs to the same family of languages as Greek, and the farther back we can trace the Latin speech, the more we find it resembling the Greek forms and inflexions. But there was one thing which, century by century, altered more and more the appearance of Latin words, and that was the Latin accent. The Latin accent was, like ours, an accent of stress. The accented syllable was uttered so strongly as to spoil the clear utterance of the following syllables; and just as in our own language the noun 'minute,' derived from Latin. minūtum, has come to be pronounced 'minit' instead of 'minute,' so too in Latin a word like genos came to be pronounced indistinctly, incorrectly, irrationally, as genus. The cause of the change is the same in the Latin as in the English word. We use most of the breath at our disposal in uttering the first syllable of the word 'minute,'

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and leave the following syllable without a chance of being properly pronounced. Precisely in the same way the Roman put the strength of his voice into the utterance of the first syllable of genos, with the result that the second syllable was not given its full, proper sound of -nos, but was hurried over in such a fashion that the sound that reached the ear was rather -nus than -nos. But there is this difference between the Latin language and our own. Though we have long since abandoned the correct pronunciation 'minūte' and have universally adopted the careless utterance 'minit,' we still keep the old spelling. A Roman, however, spelled as he pronounced; so that when he became conscious that the way in which he pronounced genos was really with the sound of u not of o in the second syllable, he gave up the old spelling genos and adopted a new spelling, genus. That is what is meant by saying that Roman spelling was phonetic, while ours is traditional.

2. Of the alterations undergone by Latin words and inflexions from one century to another, the most noticeable were the changes in unaccented vowels, such as the vowel of the second syllable of genos, Class. Lat. genus. If we remove these alterations and restore the words to their proper vocalism, the affinity of Latin with Greek is much more easy to perceive. The older form of génés, namely gěnos, is exactly identical with the corresponding Greek word yévos, if we pronounce the Latin word as the Romans pronounced it, with 'hard' g. Again, the Latin Second Declension looks as if it were different from the Greek; for the typical Latin ending is us, while the

Greek is -os. But here, too, it is merely the Latin weakening of unaccented vowels that has effaced the resemblance. Before the Latin stress-accent on the first syllable had fully exerted its weakening influence on the second, a word like dõlus was pronounced and spelled dõlõs, with the same ending -Ŏs as Greek dóλos or any other noun of the Second Declension. Thus the farther back we go in the history of the Latin language, the more we find its forms resembling the Greek vocalism; and in studying Latin forms we must always bear in mind that the great influence at work in changing their appearance was the Latin accentuation.

3. What, then, were the rules of Latin accentuation, and at what periods in the history of Rome did it bring about these alterations in the vowels of unaccented syllables?

At some very early time, it is impossible to say precisely when, every Latin word was accented on the first syllable. The Perfect of fallo, for example, had the accent on the syllable fe-, and that is why the second syllable whose proper pronunciation was -fall(with an ǎ) came, in time, to be pronounced and spelled -fell- (with an ě). We, with an accent of much the same type as the Roman, can easily realize how féfalli passed gradually into fefelli; for in our own pronunciation of words like prevalent' we see the same weakening, hurrying over, or slurring of the unaccented syllable. Similarly, the old name Nămăsio- became Numesio-, and in time (see § 6) Numerio-.

At what time it was that this practice arose of throw

ing the weight of the voice on the first syllable of each and every Latin word we cannot tell, nor yet at what precise period the new fashion came in of accenting the antepenultimate syllable where the penult was short and the penult itself where it was long. The new fashion is the rule of Classical Latin; e.g. dedécoris, Gen. of dedecus, is accented on the antepaenultima because the paenultima is a short syllable, while decóris, Gen. of decor, having a long penult, is accented on the penult. We may guess that the change-a gradual, not a sudden, one-took place about 350-250 B.C., and that words like Nŭměrius, that is to say, words of four syllables with the first three short, were still later in succumbing to the new tendency. The accent probably persisted on the first syllable of such words (cf. our 'căpătălist') till the beginning of the first century B.C. But we know that the 'Older Law of Accentuation,' as it is called, was long enough in prac tice to leave its mark, where possible, on the second syllable of each and every word of the language. It is the syllable immediately following the accented syllable which in a language with stress-accentuation is always the chief sufferer. The old Latin accent being, as we have seen, on the first syllable of each word, it was the second syllable of the word which lay most exposed to its masterful influence. The only kind of second syllables which resisted that influence successfully were syllables which had a long simple vowel. Decedo, for example, preserved its second syllable unimpaired, but de-caido became deceido, then decido; and de-cădo became decedo, then decido. Sometimes the short vowel was