The Latin Circumflex

To some scholars, the Latin grammarians’ distinction between acute and circumflex accents for Latin has to be taken seriously. To others, it is a particularly clear example of absurdity inspired by Greek grammarians. Chapter 8 considers the evidence for this doctrine and shows that it has some intriguing characteristics brought out, in part, by grammarians’ discussions of accent mistakes and of the accentuation of Greek words used in Latin. The chapter goes on to argue that at an early stage of the Latin tradition on prosody, learned Romans made sense of the Greek distinction between acute and circumflex accents in such a way that they trained themselves to think they could hear a corresponding distinction in Latin.