Note 16 — Chapter II

To adduce Greek in explanation of English pitch would be a clear case of ignotum per ignotius. But interesting parallels have been noted by Mr. Stone (in R. Bridges, Milton's Prosody, 2d ed.). "The ordinary unemphatic English accent," he says, "is exactly a raising of pitch, and nothing more" (p. 143); and there are similar habits in English and Greek of turning the grave accent into acute, as in to gèt money and to gét it. The Greeks recognized three degrees of pitch: the acute (high), and the grave (low), (which, according to Dionysius, differed by about the musical interval of a fifth), and midway, the circumflex. Compare thát? (acute, expressing surprise); thât? (circumflex, expressing doubt); and thàt book (grave—'book' and not 'table'). The main difference between the two languages is that so far as we can tell classical Greek had (very much like modern French) a pitch-accent and very little or no stress-accent, whereas English has both (though stress-accent preponderates).