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Latin phonology continually evolved over the centuries, making it difficult for speakers in one era to know how Latin was spoken before then. A given phoneme may be represented by different letters in different periods. This article deals primarily with modern scholarship's best reconstruction of Classical Latin's phonemes (phonology) and the pronunciation and spelling used by educated people in the late Roman Republic. This article then touches upon later changes and other variants. Knowledge of how Latin was pronounced comes from Roman grammar books, common misspellings by Romans, transcriptions into other ancient languages, and from how pronunciation has evolved in derived Romance languages.
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.
In linguistics, a proparoxytone is a word with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, such as the English words "cinema" and "operational". Related concepts are paroxytone and oxytone.
In linguistics, a paroxytone is a word with stress on the penultimate syllable, that is, the second last syllable, such as the English word potáto.
In linguistics, an oxytone is a word with the stress on the last syllable, such as the English words correct and reward.
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.
A mora is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ba consists of one mora (monomoraic), while a long syllable such as baa consists of two (bimoraic); extra-long syllables with three moras (trimoraic) are relatively rare. Such metrics are also referred to as syllable weight.
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch rather than by loudness, as in many languages, like English. Pitch-accent also contrasts with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Standard Chinese, in which each syllable can have an independent tone. Some have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.
Japanese pitch accent is a feature of the Japanese language that distinguishes words by accenting particular morae in most Japanese dialects. The nature and location of the accent for a given word may vary between dialects. For instance, the word for "now" is in the Tokyo dialect, with the accent on the first mora, but in the Kansai dialect it is. A final or is often devoiced to or after a downstep and an unvoiced consonant.
Penult is a linguistics term for the second to last syllable of a word. It is an abbreviation of penultimate, which describes the next-to-last item in a series. The penult follows the antepenult and precedes the ultima. For example, the main stress falls on the penult in such English words as banána, and Mississíppi, and just about all words ending in –ic such as músic, frántic, and phonétic. Occasionally, "penult" refers to the last word but one of a sentence.
Ancient Greek phonology is the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek. This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier. The pronunciation of Ancient Greek is not known from direct observation, but determined from other types of evidence. Some details regarding the pronunciation of Attic Greek and other Ancient Greek dialects are unknown, but it is generally agreed that Attic Greek had certain features not present in English or Modern Greek, such as a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; a distinction between single and double consonants and short and long vowels in most positions in a word; and a word accent that involved pitch.
Ancient Greek grammar is morphologically complex and preserves several features of Proto-Indo-European morphology. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, articles, numerals and especially verbs are all highly inflected.
The grave accent is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using the Latin alphabet, such as Mohawk and Yoruba, and with non-Latin writing systems such as the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and the Bopomofo or Zhuyin Fuhao semi-syllabary. It has no single meaning, but can indicate pitch, stress, or other features.
The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit, or Vedic accent for brevity, is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta उदात्त "raised", anudātta अनुदात्त "not raised" and svarita स्वरित "sounded". It is most similar to the pitch-accent system of modern-day Japanese.
The phonology of Turkish deals with current phonology and phonetics, particularly of Istanbul Turkish. A notable feature of the phonology of Turkish is a system of vowel harmony that causes vowels in most words to be either front or back and either rounded or unrounded. Velar stop consonants have palatal allophones before front vowels.
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography, which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography, introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics.
Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual (stress) system of the Proto-Indo-European language.
In linguistics, the ultima is the last syllable of a word, the penult is the next-to-last syllable, and the antepenult is third-from-last syllable. In a word of three syllables, the names of the syllables are antepenult-penult-ultima.
In Ancient Greek grammar, a perispomenon (περισπώμενον) is a word with a high-low pitch contour on the last syllable, indicated in writing by a circumflex accent mark. A properispomenon has the same kind of accent, but on the penultimate syllable.
The Ancient Greek accent is believed to have been a melodic or pitch accent.
References
Herbert Weir Smyth. Greek Grammar. paragraph 158.
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