Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ... ON SOME MISCELLANEOUS POINTS OF PRONUNCIATION, DICTION, AND STYLE. ONE of the difficulties in the way of an Englishman's appreciating French poetry is the treatment of words and names from his own and other accented languages. Words from German, English, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, if pronounced with the proper accent, are essentially incompatible with French in a way that they are not with other languages. Accordingly, they are in French verse deprived of the tonic accent, and pronounced as far as possible as if they were French words of similar spelling, except that final consonants are usually sounded. Thus, since ei in peine --a. short open e, ei in Heine is pronounced in the same way. The au in Faust is treated as 3, and so is the o in lost. and accordingly these words can rhyme. Tom, qu'un abandon scandalise, Recite Love's Labour Lost; Et Fritz explique a Cydalise Le Walpurgisnichtstraum de Faust. Th. Gautier, Emaux et Camies. The e mute of English, which is now a mere typographical sign, and the atonic final e of German, which is more of a syllable than the French e mute, are both assimilated entirely to e mute. Thus Love's is a dissyllable in the stanza just quoted, and Gladstone counts as three syllables in the following couplet: -- Personne pour toi. Tous sont d'accord. Celui-ci, Nomme Gladstone, dit a tes bourreaux: Merci. V. Hugo, VAnnee Terrible. In Latin, short e counts as e, um as omm, and the vowels are generally nasalized before n, as in the ordinary French school-boy pronunciation. One result of the removal of the tonic accent is, that final syllables, which would be quite atonic in their own language, are made to bear the caesura and rhyme. Baudelaire even goes so far as to write rhymes in..."
