Excerpt from Quantity and Accent in the Pronunciation of Latin The correspondence in The Times during the past year makes it clear that we have still with us a remnant of that older race of classical scholars who were ever clamant to be let alone in their easy-going pronunciation of Latin. Yet it was their custom to pride themselves upon their accuracy, and if anyone in their hearing failed to pronounce such words as antiquus, amicus, fortuna, or imperator, with the accent on the long vowel of the penult, or tarditas, trepidus, erimis, or paries, with the accent on the antepenult, the offending person was promptly cast without the pale. They seemed to be curiously unconscious of their own amazing blunders; they would shorten the long vowels in all such words as sol, non, vox, nil, lex, lectus, rex, rectum; they would lengthen the short vowel in the accented syllable of nota, rosa, toga, volens, bene, deus, bonus, socius, hieme, societas; they frequently accented the antepenult instead of the penult in minister, facultas, libertas, excellens; and so with many other analogous words. And if they made use of the phrases bona fide or sine qua non, fide was made to rime with "tidy," and sine with "briny." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."