Ultima (linguistics)

Last updated

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.

Contents

Etymology

Ultima comes from Latin ultima (syllaba) "last (syllable)". Penult and antepenult are abbreviations for paenultima and antepaenultima. Penult has the prefix paene "almost", and antepenult has the prefix ante "before".

Classical languages

In Latin and Ancient Greek, only the three last syllables can be accented. In Latin, a word's stress is dependent on the weight or length of the penultimate syllable. In Ancient Greek, the place and the type of accent are dependent on the length of the vowel in the ultima.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Latin phonology and orthography</span> Phonology of the Latin language

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-to-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 pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch rather than by loudness or length, as in some other 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.

Dreimorengesetz is a linguistic rule proposed by Hermann Hirt for placing the accent in a Germanic text. According to the rule, an enclitic cannot be more than three morae in length. That is, three shorts, a long and a short, or a short and a long. Within a single word the most that can follow the accent is a long and a short.

In Ancient Greek grammar, a barytone is a word without any accent on the last syllable. Words with an acute or circumflex on the second-to-last or third-from-last syllable are barytones, as well as words with no accent on any syllable:

<i>Eureka</i> (word) Exclamation for a discovery or invention

Eureka is an interjection used to celebrate a discovery or invention. It is a transliteration of an exclamation attributed to Ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes.

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.

The grammar of Modern Greek, as spoken in present-day Greece and Cyprus, is essentially that of Demotic Greek, but it has also assimilated certain elements of Katharevousa, the archaic, learned variety of Greek imitating Classical Greek forms, which used to be the official language of Greece through much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Modern Greek grammar has preserved many features of Ancient Greek, but has also undergone changes in a similar direction as many other modern Indo-European languages, from more synthetic to more analytic structures.

Paumarí is an Arauan language spoken in Brazil by about 300 older adults out of an ethnic population of 900. It is spoken by the Paumari Indians, who call their language “Pamoari”. The word “Pamoari” has several different meanings in the Paumarí language: ‘man,’ ‘people,’ ‘human being,’ and ‘client.’ These multiple meanings stem from their different relationships with outsiders; presumably it means ‘human being’ when they refer to themselves to someone of ostensibly equal status, and ‘client’ when referring to their people among river traders and Portuguese speakers.

Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Portuguese orthography</span> Alphabet and spelling

Portuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis was abolished by the last Orthography Agreement. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes.

This article deals with the phonology and phonetics of Standard Modern Greek. For phonological characteristics of other varieties, see varieties of Modern Greek, and for Cypriot, specifically, see Cypriot Greek § Phonology.

The traditional English pronunciation of Latin, and Classical Greek words borrowed through Latin, is the way the Latin language was traditionally pronounced by speakers of English until the early 20th century.

Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual (stress) system of the Proto-Indo-European language.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ilocano language</span> Austronesian language spoken by the Ilocano people of the Philippines

Ilocano is an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines, primarily by Ilocano people and as a lingua franca by the Igorot people and also by the native settlers of Cagayan Valley. It is the third most-spoken native language in the country.

References