“‘Between uneducated and educated, or hot and cold, or bitter and sweet … there’s a middle point’: Varro and the Middle Accent”. In J. F. Eska, O. Hackstein, R. I. Kim, and J.-F. Mondon (eds), The method works: studies on language change in honor of Don Ringe. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2024, 307–26.
The first author known to have written about the Latin accent in any detail was Varro. His discussion of accents does not survive, but a late antique work that goes under the name ‘Pseudo-Sergius’ tells us that he took over from the Greek grammarian Tyrannio, his contemporary, a system of four ‘accents’: acute, grave, circumflex, and middle. While the acute, grave, and circumflex accents feature in most ancient descriptions of both the Greek and the Latin accent, the middle never caught on as a mainstream doctrine for either language. For this reason, our evidence for it is very slight: for either Greek or Latin, what was actually meant by the middle accent? This chapter takes a fresh look at the evidence and the solutions that have been proposed, and makes a new suggestion as regards Varro’s application of the concept to Latin.
