This text is part of:
[33]
in itself Our accents also are less agreeable than
those of the Greeks. This is due to a certain rigidity
and monotony of pronunciation, since the final
[p. 469]
syllable is never marked by the rise of the acute
accent nor by the rise and fill of the circumflex, but
one or even two grave accents1 are regularly to be
found at the end. Consequently the Greek language
is so much more agreeable in sound than the Latin,
that our poets, whenever they wish their verse to
be especially harmonious, adorn it with Greek words.
1 I.e. the last syllable and often the last two syllables have the grave accent. See I. v. sqq.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.