It seems not to be generally known that there is a real principle in the English pronunciation of words borrowed from Latin and Greek, whether directly or through French. In this matter the very knowledge of classical Latin, of its stresses and its quantities, still more perhaps an acquaintance with Greek, is apt to mislead. Some speakers seem to think that their scholarship will be doubted unless they say 'doctrínal' and 'scriptúral' and 'cinéma'. The object of this paper is to show by setting forth the principles consciously or unconsciously followed by our ancestors that such pronunciations are as erroneous as in the case of the ordinary man they are unnatural and pedantic. An exception for which there is a reason must of course be accepted, but an exception for which reason is unsound is on every ground to be deprecated. Among other motives for preserving the traditional pronunciation must be reckoned the claim of poetry. Mark Pattison notes how a passage of Pope which deals with the Barrier Treaty loses much of its effect because we no longer stress the second syllable of 'barrier'. Pope's word is gone beyond recovery, but others which are threatened by false theories may yet be preserved.
The New English Dictionary, whose business it is to record facts, shows that in not a few common words there is at present much confusion and uncertainty concerning the right pronunciation. This applies mostly to the position of the stress or, as some prefer to call it, the accent, but in many cases it is true also of the quantity of the vowels. It is desirable to show that there is a principle in this matter, rules which have been naturally and unconsciously obeyed, because they harmonize with the genius of the English tongue.
For nearly three centuries from the Reformation to the Victorian era there was in this country a uniform pronunciation of Latin. It had its own definite principles, involving in some cases a disregard of the classical quantities though not of the classical stress or accent. It survives in borrowed words such as āliăs and stămina, in naturalized legal phrases, such as Nīsī Prius and ōnus probandi, and with some few changes in the Westminster Play. This pronunciation is now out of fashion, but, since its supersession does not justify a change in the pronunciation 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 mŭlĭĕrĭs or mŭlĭĕrēs, 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. primăque 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 'metropolĭtan', 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.