At all events it is often difficult to distinguish the rough breathing from the glide which easily develops into it by the help of a little additional stress. This glide may be detected after mediæ, tenues, and s, whether initial or final, as in our cold (when pronounced emphatically), pack, and big. The Irish and Danish aspirated consonants are formed by laying a separate stress on the glide apart from the stress laid upon the preceding consonant. The aspirated letters of Greek and Sanskrit, described above, are of course different, as here we have a combination of two independent sounds, though the latter of these (h) is in Mr. Sweet’s eyes a mere glide-vowel in the mouth.
Glides may be absent where two consonants formed in the same part of the vocal organs are united together (e.g. and, its), or even where they are formed in different parts. This is especially the case with English. Wherever homorganic sounds are produced, the vocal organs pass at once from the position required for the first to that required for the second, without first falling back into the “position of indifference.” Where an explosive is followed by a nasal, a sudden opening of the velum pendulum is substituted for the usual “explosion,” as first pointed out by Kudelka.
Syllables may differ one from the other in respect of pitch or tone, of stress, and of quantity. Pitch or tone is but little noticed by Englishmen, since with us it serves merely a logical or emotional purpose, such as the expression of surprise or the asking of a question, but in some languages, Chinese or Swedish or Lithuanian, for example, every word has its own separate tone, which helps to distinguish it from other words. This, too, was the case in Vedic Sanskrit, and in ancient Greek and Latin, what we call the Greek accents being really the marks of the pitch at which words were pronounced. Pitch or tone depends on the rapidity of the vibrations of sound, and may be either rising, level, or falling. The rising tone is that indicated by the acute accent. Tone may also be compound, marked in Greek by the circumflex. The compound or circumflex is heard when the tone of a vowel is again raised after it has already passed the moment of its greatest intensity, and it may therefore be described as composed of the acute and the grave, or of the rising and the falling. It may be noticed in Lithuanian as well as in several German dialects, such as the Thuringian, which have a singing character, and when it falls upon a diphthong the second element of the diphthong is distinctly raised in pitch. Naturally it is usually found with diphthongs and long vowels, but short vowels combined with a liquid may also carry the circumflex. In Greek it commonly implies a contraction, the circumflex resulting from the coalescence of a vowel which has the acute accent with one which has the grave.[172]
The Vedic system of accentuation best exhibits the fundamental character of accent of pitch. The udâtta or acute denotes the highest pitch reached by the voice in a group of syllables or words. In the syllable immediately preceding the voice naturally sinks to its lowest, thus producing the anudâtta, or grave tone. After the udâtta, however, the voice falls gradually; consequently the syllable which follows has the swarita or circumflex accent, and it is only the next syllable to that which is again anudâtta.
But the tone is regulated by three different conditions, which sometimes act antagonistically. It may be either a syllable-tone, determined by the relative force with which the syllables of a word can be uttered, dependent on the nature of the sounds of which they are composed; or a word-tone, determined in great measure by the meaning, and serving to distinguish words from one another; or a sentence-tone, mostly determined by logic or the feelings. The Greek accents, like the Vedic ones, were used to denote all three varieties of tone; while the acute and the circumflex sometimes represent the syllable-accent (as in θῖνα, ἔτυπον), sometimes the word-accent (as in νυμφή, νύμφα, ποδῶν), the grave, as Sievers remarks, “is a concession to the requirements of the sentence-tone.” Similarly in Vedic Sanskrit, the udâtta which ordinarily indicates the word-accent, falling as it does upon the syllable (commonly the flection) to which the signification caused the attention to be chiefly directed, seems also to have indicated the sentence-tone, since the verb of the principal clause has no accent whatever attached to it. Previously, however, both in Greek and Sanskrit the accents denoted the word-tone, and the remarkable agreement between the accentuation of the two languages enables us to restore in great measure the accentuation of the undivided parent-speech. It cannot be an accident, for instance, which makes the numeral seven (saptán, ἑπτά) oxyton in both languages, and the numeral five (pánchan, πέντε) paroxyton, or places the acute accent on the last syllable of adjectives in -us; the accentuation in each instance must have been that of the Parent-Aryan. Where the accentuation of the two languages differs, it can generally be explained by the disturbing influence of analogy. Thus while there is so remarkable an agreement between the accentuation of Vedic and Greek nouns, there is next to none between that of the verbs. But an explanation of this is forthcoming. The verb of the principal clause in the Veda loses its accent, as has just been remarked, unless it stand at the beginning of the sentence; in fact, it is regarded as an enclitic, and throws its tone back upon the preceding word however many syllables it may contain. Now in Greek a rule gradually grew up forbidding the accent to be placed further back than the antepenultimate; the accent, accordingly, which in the case of verbal forms of more than two syllables would have been on the last syllable of the preceding word in the Veda fell on the penultima of the corresponding verbal form itself in Greek. The accentuation which thus fixed itself in the verb of the principal clause was extended by analogy to the verb of the subordinate clause, and eventually to verbal forms of less than three syllables; φημι, εἰμι, and ἐστι, however, remained unaccented to bear witness to the process whereby the Greek language had changed the original accentuation of the Aryan verb.[173] This, like the accentuation of the noun, was mostly (and probably at the outset altogether) on the flection-suffix to which it called attention, and thus marked out the symbols that expressed the grammatical relations of the sentence. In the Semitic languages, on the contrary, the primitive accentuation was on the penultima, though there may possibly have been an earlier time when it was upon the ultima.[174] The tendency to throw back the accent set in early in Aryan speech; in Latin, as in the Æolic dialect of Greece, it was uniformly as near the beginning of a word as possible, and the preservation of the original pitch-accent in Lithuanian is one of the most curious marks of archaism in that most conservative of West-Aryan tongues.
In Aryan the word-tone, we have seen, was primarily used in the service of grammar. In Chinese, Siamese, and other Taic languages, however, its use is lexical rather than grammatical; here it serves to distinguish the senses of words which would otherwise be pronounced in the same way. Dr. Edkins has shown that modern Mandarin Chinese is an exceedingly decayed speech; its initial consonants have been worn away; and all its final consonants reduced to the same monotonous nasal. To prevent the confusion that would thus have been occasioned in a monosyllabic language, where the possible number of different syllables denoting words was limited even before the corroding action of phonetic decay, tones were adapted to the expression of meaning, and as old letters disappeared new tones came into existence. To create a new tone, says Dr. Edkins, requires about 1,200 years.
The sentence-tone is inseparable from speech even of the most lifeless character. Each sentence has its own key, and the several parts of it their own pitch. The tone rises when we ask a question, it falls when we answer it, it reaches the “level” point of neutrality when we speak in monotone. But there are dialects and languages in which monotone is either acute or grave. “Thus in Scotch the rising tone is often employed monotonously, not only in questions but also in answers and statements of facts. In Glasgow Scotch the falling tone predominates.”[175] In French, too, the rising tone is often used in making statements of fact.
Quite distinct from accent of pitch is accent of stress, though the close connection between the two may be gathered from the fact that in modern Greek the stress accent regularly answers to the acute and circumflex of the ancient language. Much of this regularity, however, may be due to the same pedantic revival which has resuscitated the dialect of Plato and Thucydides and substituted it for the “modern Greek” spoken half a century ago. Stress is the force with which the different syllables of words are uttered, and increased force is naturally accompanied by increased pitch. Stress, in fact, corresponds to syllable-tone and word-tone, emphasis—the stress of a sentence—corresponding to sentence-tone. Like pitch, it may be regarded as either rising, level, or falling. Stress, however, differs from pitch in its variability; there is no gradual fall, but a tendency “to sway to and fro,” as Mr. Sweet expresses it. Rising stress may consequently be of varying degrees of force and falling stress of weakness, level stress, even in French, being practically unknown. Stress and pitch together give to speech its rhythmic character, and make it the lyric utterance in which man expresses his thoughts and his emotions. Where the rhythm is regular we have poetry and song, where it is irregular the language of ordinary prose. Stress is the great conservator of language; the chief counterpoise to the action of phonetic decay. The accented syllable will be preserved though all the other syllables by which it is surrounded may disappear in pronunciation, just as the idea upon which emphasis is laid will hold out successfully against the attacks of age and forgetfulness. Winteler[176] has laid down the law that in accented syllables, liquids, nasals, and spirants are always long after a short vowel if followed by a consonant (e.g. man̄ly, Germ. al̄t.)
The loss of the accent of pitch in modern English and the consequent extension of the accent of stress have made us less observant of quantity than the grammarians of India or the poets of ancient Greece. All syllables, however, may be classed as long, half-long, or short, due to the duration of the force with which they are uttered. According to Brücke, the duration needed for the production of a long vowel is to that needed for the production of short vowels in the proportion of five to three, but Sievers remarks that this only applies to the oratorical pronunciation of modern literary German. In any case, the length of the same vowel may vary according to circumstances; it is long, for instance, in the English sīz (seize), short in sĭs (cease). Several of the Scotch dialects possess no long vowels at all, while in French most vowels are half-long, distinctly short accented vowels being final, as in oui.[177] Like vowels, consonants, too, may be long or short. In our own language final consonants are long after short vowels (as hill), short after long vowels (as heel), and l and the nasals are lengthened before sonants (as build), shortened before surds (as built). Short final consonants after short vowels make the pronunciation appear clipped, as in German words like mann.