Precentor

“ Preterits which stress the ending throughout are called weak; those which do not stress the ending throughout are called strong: partí, partíst, part [134] í, partím, partítz, partíron is weak; saup, saubíst, saup, saubém, saubétz, sáubron is strong. Verbs of the first and fourth conjugations regularly have weak preterits (amęi, finí) . Verbs of the second and third, with very few exceptions, originally had strong preterits (placuī > plac, fēcī > fis) : many of them, however, developed weak preterits either in Vulgar Latin or in Provençal (irasquęi, nasquęi, tessęi tesquęi, visquęi) ”

“ The misuse of the perfect participle for the preterite, now almost the invariable rule in vulgar American, is common to many other dialects of English, and seems to be a symptom of a general decay of the perfect tenses. That decay has been going on for a long time, and in American, the most vigorous and advanced of all the dialects of the language, it is particularly well marked. Even in the most pretentious written American it shows itself. ”

“ Note.— Old forms with ō̆ (u) for later e occasionally occur in verbs originally belonging to the OHG. Class II; and in like manner ī̆ for e in the pret. subjunctive.
§ 89. The MHG. weak verbs are divided into two classes, according as the preterite is formed in -te or -ete (see however § 40) . The inflexion of the present is the same in both classes.
Class I.
§ 90. To this class belong (1) verbs which have old long stem-syllables. Those having a mutated vowel in the present have the corresponding unmutated vowel in the preterite. ”

“ The verbs of the Weak Conjugation (the so-called Regular Verbs of Modern English) form their preterit 17 and past participle by adding to the present stem a suffix6 with d or t: Modern English love, loved; sleep, slept.
The stem of the preterit plural is never different from the stem of the preterit singular; hence these verbs have only three distinctive tense-stems, or principal parts: viz., (1) the present indicative, (2) the preterit indicative, and (3) the past participle. ”

“ Yes, but I also value Precossi's society—indeed it is a stronger feeling,—Precossi, the son of the blacksmith,—that thin, little fellow, who has kind, sad eyes and a frightened air; who is so timid that he says to every one, “Excuse me”; who is always sickly, and who, nevertheless, studies so much. His father goes home drunk, and beats him without the slightest reason in the world, and tosses his books and his copy-books in every direction. And Precossi comes to school with the black-and-blue marks on his face, and sometimes with his face all swollen, and his eyes red with weeping. ”

“ Moreover, this perfect participle, thus put in place of the preterite, was further reinforced by the fact that it was the adjectival form of the verb, and hence collaterally familiar. Finally, it was also the authentic preterite in the passive voice, and although this influence, in view of the decay of the passive, may not have been of much consequence, nevertheless it is not to be dismissed as of no consequence at all. ”

“ The Latin perfect came to be restricted to its aorist sense, and the perfect was expressed by compounds of habēre with the perfect participle. In the Romance languages all compound tenses were eventually formed in this way: ai cantat, avia cantat, aurai cantat, etc. In Provençal the auxiliary is sometimes ęsser, instead of avẹr, if the main verb is reflexive, passive, or neuter; ęsser is particularly common with neuter verbs of motion: sọi vengütz. [112] A participle used with avẹr may agree in gender and number with the direct object, if there is one: ai cantat or cantada la cansọ. ”

“ One has just been discussed: the addition of a degenerated form of have to the preterite of the auxiliary, and its use in place of the auxiliary itself. Another is the use of will instead of shall in the first person future. Shall is confined to a sort of optative, indicating much more than mere intention, and even here it is yielding to will. Yet another is the consistent use of the transferred preterite in the passive. Here the rule in correct English is followed faithfully, though the perfect participle employed is not the English participle. “I am broke” is a good example. ”

“ Now no grammarian ever mentions more than one sound for Latin c. Again, if Latin c had ever had the sound of s, surely some of the Greeks, ignorant of Latin and spelling by ear, would at least occasionally have represented Latin c by σ,—a thing which none of them has ever done. It is probable that the modification of c which is noticed in the modern languages was a characteristic of the Umbrian and Oscan dialects and so prevailed to some extent in the provinces, but there is absolutely not the slightest evidence to show that it formed a part of the pronunciation of cultivated men at Rome. ”

“ Therefore, the Ferdinand and Isabella shows here and there an uncertainty of touch and a lack of assured method such as were quite natural in one who had undertaken so ambitious a task with so little technical experience.
In the matter of style, Prescott had not yet emancipated himself from that formalism which had been inherited from the eighteenth-century writers, and which Americans, with the wonted conservatism of provincials, retained long after Englishmen had begun to write with naturalness and simplicity. Even in fiction this circumstance is noticeable. ”

“ These mi-verbs are sometimes called non-Thematic to distinguish them from the Thematic or ō-verbs.
91 Conjugation of Anomalous Verbs. 135.
Only the present indicative and subjunctive are at all irregular:
Note.—The preterit subjunctive of bēon is formed, of course, not from wæs, but from wǣron. See § 103, (3) .
Preterit-Present Verbs. (See § 19.) 136.
These verbs are called Preterit-Present because the present tense (indicative and subjunctive) of each of them is, in form, a strong preterit, the old present having been displaced by the new. They all have weak preterits. ”

“ Hence, Prescott's chapters on the Arabs in Spain, although they appear to the general reader to represent exact and solid knowledge, are in fact inaccurate in parts. In other respects, however, the most modern historical scholarship has detected no serious flaws in Ferdinand and Isabella. Such defects as the book possesses are negative rather than positive, and they are really due to the author's cast of mind. Prescott, was not, and he never became, a philosophical historian. ”

“ In conversing on various matters, General Prentiss showed me, with a smile, a copy of a newspaper, published in Kentucky, which contained an “article” on himself that cannot readily meet with a parallel even in the journalism of this part of the world. For the benefit of your readers I send it, that they may judge what sort of a people it must be which tolerates the use of such language:
There is a man now vegetating at Cairo, by name Prentiss, who is in command of the forces at that point. ”

“ No single investigator can examine the speech of the whole country; for that business a pooling of forces is necessary. But meanwhile it may be of interest to set forth a few provisional ideas.
At the start two streams of influence upon vulgar American pronunciation may be noted, the one an inheritance from the English of the colonists, and the other arising spontaneously within the country, and apparently much colored by immigration. The first influence, it goes without saying, is gradually dying out. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of the diphthong oi. ”

“ There is no doubt that at this late period, Latin c had become modified before e or i so as to be equivalent to s or z. Latin words received into German at this time represent c before e or i by z. But had this modification been a part of the usage of the classical language, it would have been noticed by the grammarians, who discuss each letter with great minuteness. ”

“ The debate that long raged over the pronunciation of classical Latin exhibits the difficulty of determining with exactness the shades of sound in the speech of a people long departed from earth. The American colonists, of course, are much nearer to us than the Romans, and so we should have relatively little difficulty in determining just how they pronounced this or that word, but against the fact of their nearness stands the neglect of our phonologists. ”

“ The causes for the change of position are not always easy to ascertain. In words of four syllables with a long penult and words of five syllables with a short penult there probably developed a secondary accent which in course of time replaced the earlier accent upon the first syllable. But the number of such long words in Latin is comparatively small. It is no less possible that relations between the stress and pitch accents were concerned. ”

“ These inflections, as we shall see, are often disregarded in use, but nevertheless it is profitable to glance at them as they stand. The only variations that they show from standard English are the substitution of n for s as the distinguishing mark of the absolute form of the possessive, and the attempt to differentiate between the logical and the merely polite plurals in the second person by adding the usual sign of the plural to the former. The use of n in place of s is not an American innovation. ”

“ This is so agreeable to English analogy, that in words derived from the Latin, where the penultimate vowel, followed by a single consonant, is long, and consequently has the accent, we almost always neglect this exception, as it may be called, in the Latin language, and fall into our own general rule of accenting the antepenultimate. Nor is it unworthy of being remarked, that when we neglect the accent of the original, it is almost always to place it at least a syllable higher ”

“ The same movement also affects standard English, as appears by Robert Bridges’ “Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation,” but I believe that it is stronger in America, and will go farther, at least with the common speech, if only because of our unparalleled immigration. Standard English has 19 separate vowel sounds. No other living tongue of Europe, save Portuguese, has so many; most of the others have a good many less; Modern Greek has but five. The immigrant, facing all these vowels, finds some of them quite impossible ”

“ Thus the strong stress accent existing in the transition period between Latin and French led to the curtailing of long Latin words like latrocínium or hospitále into the words which we have borrowed from French into English as larceny and hotel. It will be observed that the first syllable and that which bears the accent are the two which best withstand change, though the strong tendency in English to stress heavily the first syllable bids fair ultimately to oust the e in the pronunciation of larceny. ”

“ The men of a given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in their oral speech there are wide variations. “No two persons,” says a leading contemporary authority upon English phonetics, [2] “pronounce exactly alike.” Moreover, “even the best speaker commonly uses more than one style.” The result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given combination of letters at any time and place. ”

“ That i had a consonant sound as distinct from its vowel sound is clear from the statement of Priscian (I. p. 13, Keil) . Before a vowel and not preceded by an accented syllable with final consonant, he says that i "passes over to the force of a consonant." That it differs from i the vowel, is also clear from the fact that in prosody it lengthens the preceding vowel.
(b) That it was not like English j is clear from the fact that it readily passes into i, which proves the two sounds to have been closely akin; and in Greek transliterations it is always represented by ι. ”

“ This peculiarity of our language makes it more difficult for us than for other peoples to get the Latin accent, which is one of pitch.
In Latin the acute accent means that on the syllable thus accented you raise the pitch; the grave indicates merely the lower tone; the circumflex, that the voice is first raised, then depressed, on the same syllable. To quote again the passage from Priscian:
[Keil. v. III. p. 519.] Acutus namque accentus ideo inventus est quod acuat sive elevet syllabam; gravis vero eo quod deprimat aut deponet; circumflexus ideo quod deprimat et acuat. ”

“ Accent, therefore, in English has no necessary power to lengthen the sound of the vowel of the syllable on which it is placed; and if some learned men on the banks of the Rhine, in the days of Erasmus, or on the banks of the Isis, in our day, cannot accent a syllable without at the same time lengthening it, this happens merely because, as the Bear says, they are “adeo crassi;” [Pg 57] their ears are gross, and have lost—by the dust of the libraries, perhaps—the healthy power of discerning differences of modulation in the living human voice. ”

“ So long ago as the fifteenth century the old clear distinction between ye, nominative, and you, objective, disappeared, and today the latter is used in both cases. Sweet says that the phonetic similarity between ye and thee, the objective form of the true second singular, was responsible for this confusion. [10] In modern spoken English, indeed, you in the objective often has a sound far more like that of ye than like that of you, as, for example, in “how do y’ do?” and in American its vowel takes the neutral form of the e in the definite article, and the word becomes a sort of shortened yuh. ”