The Meaning of a Word in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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• The Meaning of a Word in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Norbert F. Lain (bio)

The figure of woman as she appears in the liturgy of the church passed silently through the darkness: a whiterobed figure, small and slender as a boy and with a falling girdle. Her voice, frail and high as a boy's, was [End Page 127] heard intoning from a distant choir the first words of a woman which pierce the gloom and clamour of the first chanting of the passion:

—Et tu cum Jesu Galilæo eras. [You too were with Jesus the Galilean.]

And all hearts were touched and turned to her voice, shining like a young star, shining clearer as the voice intoned the proparoxyton and more faintly as the cadence died.¹

The word "proparoxyton" has puzzled readers. "Proparoxytone," spelled with a final e, is a technical term that means "having an acute accent on the antepenult in classical Greek."² This word is also used more generally to describe a word in any language that is accented on the antepenult, the third syllable from the end in a word. A word accented on the penult, the next to last syllable in a word, is said to be "paroxytone," while a word accented on the ultima, the final syllable, is called "oxytone."

Scholars have encountered a problem when they have tried to relate Joyce's word "proparoxyton" to the sentence "[e]t tu cum Jesu Galilæo eras." Students of Latin know that a Latin word of more than two syllables is accented on the penult if that penult is heavy (by virtue of containing a long vowel, a diphthong, or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants), but if the penult is light (by virtue of containing a short vowel followed by fewer than two consonants), the word is accented on the antepenult (compare a-mā′-vī and mi′- se-rum, respectively). Galilæo is the only word in the Latin sentence that contains more than two syllables, and it has therefore been taken to be the only possible referent of "proparoxyton."

As indicated above, the term "proparoxytone" is applied to a word that is accented on the antepenult. Is "Galilæo" accented on the antepenult? At least one commentator, Don Gifford, has claimed that it is. He divides "Galilæo" into five syllables and accents it as follows: Ga-li-la′-e-ō.³ By this analysis, Galilæo is "the proparoxyton" to which Joyce refers.

It is useful to know, however, that in the Roman altar missals from which priests read the words of the Latin Mass in Joyce's day, all words of more than two syllables were written with accent marks for the benefit of priests who were unable to master the rules of Latin accentuation. I have looked at a number of these missals, and all of them print the word in question to be pronounced as follows: Ga-lilæ′-ō, with four syllables, not five, and with accent on the penult, not the antepenult.⁴ The digraph, æ, indicates that the æ in "Galilæo" is to be pronounced as a diphthong, the vowel sound of a single syllable. When a and e occur in succession but are to be pronounced as two vowels in separate syllables, they are printed in the Roman missals as aë; for example, Raphaël, in effect, Ra′-pha-el. "Galilæo" is accented on the penult, not the antepenult, and is therefore paroxytone, not [End Page 128] proparoxytone. If Joyce intended "proparoxyton" to refer to "Galilæo," then, he used the term erroneously. Joyce knew Latin and the Roman liturgy well, however, and there is no reason to think that he did not know how "Galilæo" was accented or that he would misuse the term "proparoxyton."

The woman's voice is said to be "shining clearer as the voice intoned the proparoxyton and more faintly as the cadence died." There seems to be no point in speaking of intoning a single word in the sentence as distinct from the other words in the sentence. In fact, the woman's voice is said to be intoning "the...