¹ Growth and Structure of the English Language, 105; Modern English Grammar, 5.52.

² Rhythm in English Prose, Anglia 36, 1-59.

³ Word Stress in English, Halle 1898.

⁴ Mettig, Engl. Stud. 41,177, gives eight per cent for the period 800-1258; Jespersen, Growth and Sir., 95, reckons one-half of one per cent before 1150, two per cent before 1200.

⁵ Beiträge, Franz. Stud. 5, II, 63.

⁶ Word Stress in English, p. 115.

⁷ Modem English Grammar, I, 5.41 ff.

⁸ Words like comfort, compass, profit, promise, purchase, purpose, rescue, respite, retail, surcoat, surfeit, with first-syllable accent, are difficult by the side of compare, proceed, purvey, relief, detail, surmount; but these lean in the direction of first-syllable accent, that is, first-syllable accent is only more consistently carried out here than we should expect, so that the difficulties in this case are not very disturbing. These exceptions may point to the conclusion that the force of analogy has been neither very strong nor very consistent in fixing accentuation.

⁹ Based on the Wortregister in Behrens Beitr. with additions from Skeat's Rough Lists and Brüll, Untergangene u. veraltete Worte des Franz, im heut. Englisch, Posen 1912, hence including only words taken into English while Anglo-French was still spoken in England. Only words now current in English, whose accentuation cannot therefore be questioned, are here given. The list lays no more claim to completeness than the sources indicate. For Skeat's Lists cf. Trans. Philol. Soc., Lond. 1880-1, App. V, p. 93.

¹⁰ It may not be too venturesome to associate advent, aloes, article, idol (ideles is the form in Behrens' list), image (ymage), office, (offiz), olive, which appear in Behrens as coming from Anglo-French, with pre-conquest words taken more or less directly from Latin, such as abbot, altar, angel (A-S engel), apostle, offer (A-S offrian), because of the first-syllable accent of the former group, otherwise hard to explain. Our oldest Latin loanwords, as engel, came into English aurally, from the speech of persons who used (Vulgar) Latin as a living language, often as their mother tongue, for instance the mercatores and the early missionaries, so that the English hearers who made these words their own must have adopted the sounds and accentuation current at the time in Vulgar Latin, and these would persist in English, under English laws. But such pre-conquest words as are too late to have been heard directly from the lips of persons speaking Vulgar Latin as a living language passed through a process which involves, at some stage or other, learning these foreign words from the written form, that is through learned mediation. In this latter process the visual impression was not controlled by constant corrections impressed upon the ear, or at best was guided only by school traditions becoming ever more vague and less trustworthy, and it is natural that inaccuracies and inconsistencies should become fixed. Germanic accentuation may thus have been given to some of these learned Latin words, in the absence of another standard. If this be admissible, it may perhaps furnish the solution of the problem presented by the first list here. In any case they are not strictly popular.

¹¹ But see below, note 13.

¹² In spite of the passage in Higden's Polychronicon so often quoted, relative to “construing” in French in the schools, the situation probably was that French was used where French-speaking children predominated; but if, as seems hardly likely, French was expressly taught for the purpose of “construing” in schools where the children habitually used English, it must have been regarded by them as a mere classroom bore, to be got out of their heads as quickly as possible. Latin seems to have been the only language regularly taught in the English schools of the Middle Ages to which children of the populace were admitted. Cf. Rashdall, H., Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, Oxford 1895, 2,459; Jackson, G. L., The Privilege of Education, Boston 1908.

¹³ Bourciez, Précis de phonétique française, 9n., states the rule in this form. So also Grammont, Traité pratique de prononciation française, Paris 1914, p. 146, “accent d'insistance”; G. notes, besides this, an accent on the first syllable, even if it begins with a vowel, in case the word forms a complete “rhythmic element,”of course a much rarer condition, as áttention above, and, I suspect, óyer in our “oyer and terminer.”

¹⁴ Bibliography in Viëtor, Elemente der Phonetik, 144 f. and notes.

¹⁵ Les sons du français, pp. 44, 81, 89 ff., 129 ff.

¹⁶ Op. Cit., p. 142.

¹⁷ Their works were not accessible to me except the passages quoted in G. Paris, Ètude sur le rôle de l'accent latin etc., Paris 1862, p. 17.

¹⁸ La précellence du langage françois, 1579, reprinted etc. by E. Huguet, Paris 1896, p. 43.