ACCENT

From Agepedia

ACCENT ; the law which regulates the rising and falling of sounds or tones. Music and language, which are subject to this law, both originate in the feelings; and, although they at last separate from each other, and music remains the language of the heart, while speech, or language, properly so called, becomes the language of the mind, yet the latter does not entirely cease to speak to the heart; and music and language thus retain certain qualities in common; these are partly internal and partly external. Both are adapted to the expression of emotions; and thence arise the movements, sometimes slow and sometimes quick, which we perceive in them. They thus become subject to quantity or time ; and we distinguish sounds, with reference to quantity, into long and short. In order to express an emotion distinctly and plainly, there must be a suitable arrangement of the organs for the sounds intended to be produced; for, in a series of sounds measured by the relation of time, and regulated also by relation to some fundamental tone, there will be found a certain connexion and association, which represent the emotions in their variou relations and gradations ; it is this also, which distinguishes correctly what is of primary importance from what is secondary, renders the unimportant subordinate to the important, and gives proper weight to that which is significant. A succession of tones thus becomes a musical composition, which comprehends in itself a definite meaning or sense; and, to express this, particular regard must be had to the signification and importance of single tones in connexion. The stress, which is laid on the tones, according to the gradations of meaning, constitutes what we call accent. We distinguish the acute, or rising accent, the grave, or falling, and the circumflex. The circumflex accent falls on those syllables or tones which are long in themselves the grave properly denotes merely the absence of any stress; and thus we have only the a^ute left, to give a designation to tones. The reasons for designating a tone by accent, and dwelling on it longer than its established quantity requires, are either mechanical, rhythmical, or empbatical. We divide accent into grammatical and rhetorical, or the accent of words and of sentences, which last is called emphasis. The former rests on physical or mechanical causes ; the latter has for its object the relations of ideas. The laws which govern both are briefly the following: A syllable or tone of the natural length receives the grammatical or verbal accent; but there are two causes, which distinguish some syllables of a word from the resttheir mechanical formation and their signification. In the word strengthen, for instance, mechanical causes compel the voice to dwTell longer on the first syllable than on the second, and hence a greater stress is laid on that syllable. Rhetorical accent, or emphasis, is designed to give to a sentence distinctness and clearness. In a sentence, therefore, the stress is laid on the most important word, and in a word, on the most important syllable. Without attaching itselfj in language, to the quantity of a word, or, in music, to a certain part of a bar, the accentual force dwells on the important part; and, in order that this force may be rendered still more distinguishable, it hastens over those parts, which, though otherwise important, the context renders comparatively unimportant. It follows, from what has been said, that the accent of words and the accent of sentences, or emphasis, may be united or separated at pleasure. It may now be asked whether emphasis destroys verbal accent and quantity; and whether, for this reason, euphony does not suffer from emphasis. In answering this question (in which lies the secret of prosody in general, and the difference between the modern and ancient), four points come under consideration: I. If the accent coincides with a syllable which is long from mechanical causes, it elevates the syllable, and imparts stress to its prosodial length. 2. The accent does not render an invariably long syllable short, but deprives it, if it immediately follows the accented syllable, of a portion of its length. The quantity, therefore, if it does not coincide with the accent, may be somewhat weakened by it. 3. Although the accent cannot render an invariably long syllable short, it can change the relative quantity of common syllables. 4. The accent can never fall on syllables invariably short. These are the rules which are of the greatest importance, not only to the versifier, but also to the declaimer, and to the actor, so far as he is a declaimer. The grammatical and rhetorical nomenclature of the English language is very defective and unsettled; and hence has arisen a great degree of confusion among all our writers on the subject of accent and quantity in English. We have perverted the true meaning of long and short, as applied to syllables or vowels; and, by our peculiar application of those terms, we have made ourselves quite unintelligible to foreign nations, who still use them according to their signification in the ancient languages, from which they are derived. An English writer of some celebrity (Foster, on Accent and Quantity), whose own work, however, is not free from obscurity, observes, that he has found the word accent used by the same writer in four different sensessometimes expressing elevation, sometimes prolongation of sound, sometimes a stress of voice compounded of the other two, and sometimes the artificial accentual mark. For a long series of years, however, accent, as Johnson has remarked, in English prosody, has been the same thing with quantity; and another English writer of celebrity, bishop Horsley, observes, that it is a peculiarity of the English langxiage that quantity and accent always go together, the longest syllable, in almost every word, being that on which the accent falls. In other languages, as Mitford justly remarks (Essay on the Harmony of Language), generally, the vowel character, representing indifferently a long or a short sound, still represents the same sound, long or short. A contrary method is peculiar to English orthography. With us, the same vowel sound, long and short, is rarely represented by the same character; but, on the contrary, according to the general rules of our orthography, each character represents the long sound of one vowel and the short sound of another. This is eminently observable, as Dr. Johnson has remarked, in the letter i, which likewise happens in other letters, that the short sound is not the long sound contracted, but a sound wholly different. In addition to the difficulties arising from an imperfect nomenclature, as above remarked, there is an intrinsic difficulty in the extreme delicacy of the distinctions of tone, pitch and inflections in language, and the want of an established notation, corresponding to that which we have in music ; and, we may add, in the words of Hermann (De Emendanda Rati one Graec. Gram.), "Q,uam pauci vero sunt, qui vel aliqua polleant aurium subtilitate ut vocum discrimina celeriter notare apteque exprimere possint!"The Chinese are said to have but 330 spoken words ; but these, being multiplied by the different accents or tones which affect the vowels, furnish a language tolerably copious.