A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v1.c4.49

v1.c4.49

It is observable in French that there are often two forms of the same word—one ancient, the other modern. The ancient word, though often very much corrupted, invariably retains the accent on the same syllable as in the Latin. And the reason of this is plain: in the days when those words were adopted into common use by the inhabitants of Gaul, they were taken, as it were, from the lips of the Romans themselves and accentuated naturally just as the Romans accentuated them. They became current colloquially long before they were written in many instances, and could not fail to be pronounced correctly. But the modern forms of these words were resuscitated by learned men from Latin authors where they occurred, just as the Pandits do and have done with Sanskrit words. In borrowing these words the savants of later times did not know how they were pronounced, and did not care; they merely cut off the Latin termination, and pronounced the word as seemed best to themselves; as the modern and mediæval French accent differ considerably in the place of their incidence from the Latin accent, the result is that in no case does the modern or scientific term bear the accent on the same syllable as in Latin.¹