noticed or recognized, I have undertaken to give a more particular demonstration of it in the appended excursus. Before following the rhythmical principle of accentuation in its wider application to the larger divisions of speech, it may be well to illustrate briefly its manifestations in other expressions of human life. It is self-evident that the same law must hold especially with regard to other tones produced by the breath - to singing and to the music of wind instruments, in all of which, together with the alternation of high and low tones (melody), is observable a constant antithesis of loud and soft tones. This antithesis and regular alternanation - which, on account of the stronger intonation and unfolding of the voice, is here much more prominent than in speaking - has here long ago been noticed and known by the name of measure, designated in written music by the socalled bar, by which the musical strains are divided into parts, all equal to each other in length. The rationale of measure, however, is to be found in nothing else than this constant alternation of loud and soft tones, or of accented and unaccented tones. Between these, however, at the same time is observable, much more than in speaking, a relation of equilibrium or parallelism. For, since this antithesis flows from the undulatory pulsation of the blood and the breath, both parts, according to the law of hydrostatics, balance each other; and of this that regularity of movement in music is only a consequence although not a necessary one; and accordingly in many ancient rhythms and melodies, Greek as well as German, the measure is looser. Now it is well known that the so-called measure or rhythm is not only characteristic of singing and the music of wind instruments, but is common to all music, even to that of instruments played by the hand, nay, even to all movements of the human body (of the feet in walking and dancing, of the hands, arms, etc.); and is the more conspicuous in proportion to the force and amount of these movements. How is it, now, in these cases to be explained? Just as in the others, by the pulsation of the blood and breath, because these are the sources of all our physical life, and hence their movement communicates itself to all the movements and actions, or vital functions of man. Nay, it passes over in its influence into those expressions and states of the emotions which stand in more immediate connection with the physical state (of this more below), and it stamps upon them the law of parallelism, measure, rhythm, i.e. of the constant alternation of two antithetic movements, corresponding to, and counterbalancing, each other.1 Returning now to the proper subject of our investigation, language, we should be led by the foregoing discussion to 1 In the details, however, i.e. in the individual members and functions of the human organism, the correspondence of their motions with that of those sources cannot be mathematically proved, i.e. cannot be traced to the same number or to a definite mathematical ratio; nor indeed is there an exact equality in the undulatory strokes of those sources themselves, the blood and the breath (to one inhalation there are ordinarily three or four beats of the pulse). Hence the physiologists whose investigations are directed almost exclusively to the mechanical and chemical structure of the human organism, and who measure, weigh, and count everything, entirely ignore the above considered phenomena of the higher organic life, - accent, rhythm, measure, etc., - or if they incidentally speak of them, yet know scientifically nothing about their origin and laws, as little as they do about the reciprocal action of mind and body and the resultant mixed states and phenomena of this border region, which equally concern physiology and psychology. The law above laid down is rather to be derived from the whole, grand antithetic character which pervades the human organism and in a lower degree all organic existences -in its countless members and activities, both in the structure of its mechanism, i.e. in the composition and adaptation of its limbs and organs and in the mixture of their elements, and in its movement and activity, i.e. in the individual functions and the co-operation of those organs, in other words, in the life of the organism. Everywhere is seen here reciprocal action, oscillation, regular alternation of opposite qualities, activities, motions or stages of motion, in order constantly to preserve or restore equilibrium and harmony among them; and just herein consists the peculiar and wonderful character of organic life. To this is to be added the great expansibility and elasticity of the organs as influenced by the mind, as is best to be seen in the breath, which by artificial means can be used so much more extensively than is essential to life, and can be adapted to other motions. Hence, however various and diverse the mathematical relation or the exponent of the motion in the several members may be, yet in the general effect the particular deviations and incongruities are lost in the general harmony, in such a way that the organism as a whole exhibits in its movements the great law of rhythm, and stamps it on all organic actions, and thus makes man, so to speak, a rhythmical creature, whose movements however, as may readily be conceived, cannot be mathematically calculated and determined. confine rhythm and the accent belonging to it to the syllables, or the smallest parts of speech, and thus make it a mere syllabic rhythm and its accent merely a syllabic accent, returning with each couplet of syllables, without regard to the sense and the corresponding divisions naturally made in a discourse. But rhythm does not end with this; and now there presents itself a new, higher aspect of accentuation - that from which we started- its being used by the mind for its own purposes. It serves, as we have seen, as a means by which the mind by making prominent certain leading syllables, reduces to smaller or greater wholes, or single conceptions, the variety of sounds and syllables of which language, outwardly considered, is composed (which, as it were, constitute the body of language), or rather by which the mind animates these structures or members of the dead body of language, and pictures outwardly to the ear its inner unity. This is done by elevating the accent (raising it to a higher power), applying it to words and sentences as well as to syllables, adapting it by various gradations and distinctions to the sense, in the way described above. Thus, to the simple rhythmical principle of accentuation, a second, complex, logical, or intellectual is joined. These two are quite different from each other. The former is a mechanical one, measuring off the tones with mechanical regularity according to the number of syllables. The latter is an organic one, by which the accentuation is divided into various members and, as it were, built into an organic structure. Hence there arises between them a conflict, especially at the lower stage, in regard to the single word. For the former demands, in accordance with the rhythmical law, the repetition of the accent in polysyllabic words as often as two syllables occur, and on the other hand refuses to give it to a monosyllabic word which immediately follows an accented syllable, in order to avoid such a concurrence of two elevations of the voice as is contrary to the rhythmical law. The latter, on the contrary, can allow to the longest word only one accent, as the exponent of the one notion contained in it, and cannot refuse it even to the smallest monosyllable, however many of them may follow one another. Accordingly in such cases the dilemma seems to be presented: either one principle or the other must be given up; either, in accordance with the first, we must cease attempting to emphasize the unity of the word, or, in accordance with the second, we must forego rhythm. Nevertheless we see even here how the flexibility and elasticity of organic antithesis adjusts the conflict. This is done as follows. On the one hand, the rhythmical accents of polysyllabic words are subordinated to the verbal accent, and thus arises the antithesis of primary and secondary accent,1 which forms an intermediate step between accented syllables and those wholly unaccented. On the other hand, monosyllabic words, which, besides being weak in a phonetic and rhythmical point of view, are also in their logical relation not qualified to stand alone, i.e. which, as to their import, are always joined with other words (e.g. particles of all sorts, auxiliary verbs), or by chance are construed with another, and unite with it to form one common notion, give up their accent to this other, and in pronunciation lean upon it (enclisis, etc.). The remaining incongruities (in which, in general - at least in prose, - the logical principle precedes, and the rhythmical follows, while in poetry, on the contrary, the latter decidedly preponderates) may be to a great extent harmonized by an elastic pronunciation, and so the rhythmical law be satisfied; this depends on the character of the delivery and the mood or art of the speaker. Since, according to the foregoing, the rhythmical principle unites with the logical, or with the division according to the sense, there is presented, together with the logical gradation and division, a corresponding division of the rhythm, which brings the rise and fall of each smaller or larger logical member into parallelism with one another, by which means the stream of the discourse is broken up, in accordance with the logical division, into larger or smaller waves, from whole sentences and periods down to the single parts of the sentence and to the words, of which the former very nearly correspond to the breaths drawn in and expelled, the latter to the beating of the pulse; which rhythmical division, however, is variously limited and modified by the amount of breath inhaled, by the expense of power in the use of the voice, and by the law of rhythm. At the same time all these divisions are separated from each other by proportionate suspensions of the voice, or pauses, which, in accordance with the static law, form a series corresponding to the length of the several divisions, and are therefore in a certain sense the exponents of these, as are on the other hand the force and elevation of the rising slide in them (accents). We will now more particularly consider this division, passing in order from the smaller to the larger parts of a discourse. 1 In Hebrew, where under the name of Metheg it is very regularly written, since the verbal accent rests universally on the latter part of the word (the last two syllables), it is throughout a preliminary accent, which may appear not only once, but very frequently, according to the number and nature of the syllables: twice, nay even three times, e.g. מֵמַעֲמָרְךָ, מַעֲמָדְךָ, מַעֲמָד ,Isa. xxii. 19; הַמַאֲכילה ,Deut. viii. 16. Similarly in English, where the secondary accent is regularly two syllables distant from the primary, and in polysyllables may recur twice, e.g. indivisible, indivisibility. 1. At the first or lowest stage, where the syllabic accent assumes the character of verbal accent, the syllabic rhythm also becomes verbal rhythm, i.e. a parallelism between the accented and unaccented part of the word; 1 this becomes, in polysyllables, especially in compound words, an antithesis between the primary and secondary accent. Furthermore, 1 In Hebrew this parallellism - conformably to the rigorously rhythmical character of the ecclesiastical elocution marked by the accentuation - is developed into a decided equilibrium between the accented syllable and the foregoing unaccented part of the word, which determines the quantity of the vocalization. On the one hand, in forms which have before the accented syllable only one open syllable, the latter is prolonged, e.g. מָקוֹם, קְטַל On the other hand, in forms which have several syllables before the accent, the open ones are as far as possible rejected, in order to preserve the dissyllabic character; this is done unconditionally with the third syllable from the accent, as קְטַלְתֶּם, מְקוֹמוֹת ; conditionally with the syllable next preceding as קוֹטְלִים )with - whereas - in forms like עוֹלָמִים remains. Similarly in English, where the quantity, and accordingly the pronunciation, of the same open syllables changes according as they stand alone or in pairs before the accent, e.g. deprive, diláte, prépáre, rēstore; but deprivation, dilatátion, preparation, etc. |