girl, whom Hercules won in a game of dice (Macrobius i. 10;
Plutarch, Romulus, 4, 5, Quaest. Rom. 35; Aulus Genius
vi. 7). The god advised her to marry the first man she met
in the street, who proved to be a wealthy Etruscan named
Tarutius. She inherited all his property and bequeathed it to
the Roman people, who out of gratitude instituted in her honour
a yearly festival called Larentalia (Dec. 23). According to
some, Acca Larentia was the mother of the Lares, and, like
Ceres, Teilus, Flora and others, symbolized the fertility
of the earth--in particular the city lands and their crops.
See Mommsen, ``Die echte und die falsche Larentia,'' in
Romische Forschungen, ii. 1879; E. Pais, Ancient
Legends of Roman History (Eng. trans. 1906) whose views
on the subject are criticized by W. W. Fowler in W. H.
D. Rouse's The Year's Work in Classical Studies (1907);
C. Pascal, Studii di alntichita e Mitologia (1896).
ACCELERATION (from Lat. accelerare, to hasten, celer,
quick), hastening or quickening; in mechanics, a term
employed to denote the rate at which the velocity of a
body, whose motion is not uniform, either increases
or decreases. (See MECHANICS and HODOGRAPH.)
ACCENT. The word ``accent'' has its origin in the Lat.
accentus, which in its turn is a literal translation of
the Gr. prosodia. The early Greek grammarians used this
term for the musical accent which characterized their own
language, but later the term became specialized for quantity
in metre, whence comes the Eng. prosody. Besides various
later developments of usage it is important to observe that
``accent'' is used in two different and often contrasted
senses in connexion with language. In all languages
there are two kinds of accent: (1) musical chromatic or
pitch accent; (2) emphatic or stress accent. The former
indicates differences in musical pitch between one sound
and another in speech, the latter the difference between
one syllable and another which is occasioned by emitting
the breath in the production of one syllable with greater
energy than is employed for the other syllables of the same
word. These two senses, it is to be noticed, are different
from the common usage of the word in the statement that
some one talks with a foreign or with a vulgar accent. In
these cases, no doubt, both differences of intonation and
differences of stress may be included in the statement, but
other elements are frequently no less marked, e.g. the
pronunciation of t and d as real dentals, whereas the
English sounds so described are really produced not against
the teeth but against their sockets, the inability to produce
the interdental th whether breathed as in thin or voiced
as in this and its representation by d or z, the
production of o as a uniform sound instead of one ending as
in English in a slight u sound, or such dialect changes as
lydy (laidy) for lady, or toime for time (taime).
In different languages the relations between pitch and stress
differ very greatly. In some the pitch or musical accent
predominates. In such languages if signs are employed to
mark the position of the chief accent in the word it will
be the pitch and not the stress accent which will be thus
indicated. Amongst the languages of ancient times Sanskrit
and Greek both indicate by signs the position of the chief
pitch accent in the word, and the same method has been
employed in modern times for languages in which pitch accent
is welf marked, as it is, for example in Lithuanian, the
language still spoken by some two millions of people on the
frontier between Prussia and Russia in the neighbourhood
of Konigsberg and Vilna. Swedish also has a well-marked
musical accent. Modern Greek has changed from pitch to
stress, the stress being generally laid upon the same
syllable in modern as bore the pitch accent in ancient Greek.
In the majority of European languages, however, stress is
more conspicuous than pitch, and there is plenty of evidence
to show that the original language from which Greek, Latin,
Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic and other languages of Europe are
descended, possessed stress accent also in a marked degree.
To the existence of this accent must be attributed a large
part of the phenomena known as Ablaut or Gradation (see
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES). In modern languages we can see
the same principle at work making Acton out of the O. Eng.
(Anglo-Saxon) ac-tun (oak-town), and in more recent times
producing the contrast between New Town and Newton. In
French, stress is less marked than it is in English, but
here also there is evidence to show that in the development
from Latin to French a very strong stress accent must have
existed. The natural result of producing one syllable of a
word with greater energy than the others is that the other
syllables have a less proportion of breath assigned to
them and therefore tend to become indistinct or altogether
inaudible. Thus the strong stress accent existing in the
transition period between Latin and French led to the curtailing
of long Latin words like latrocinium or hospitale into
the words which we have borrowed from French into English
as larceny and hotel. It will be observed that the first
syllable and that which bears the accent are the two which
best withstand change, though the strong tendency in English
to stress heavily the first syllable bids fair ultimately
to oust the e in the pronunciation of larceny. No such
changes arise when a strong pitch accent is accompanied
by a weaker stress accent, and hence languages like
ancient Sanskrit and ancient Greek, where such conditions
existed, preserve fuller forms than their sister languages
or than even their own descendants, when stress takes the
place of pitch as the more important element in accent.
In both pitch and stress accent different gradations may be
observed. In pitch, the accent may be uniform, rising or
falling. Or there may be combinations of rising and falling
or of falling and rising accents upon the same syllable.
In ancient Greek, as is well known, three accents are
distinguished--(1) the acute ('), a rising accent; (2) the
grave (`), apparently merely the indication that in particular
positions in the sentence the acute accent is not used where
it would occur in the isolated word; and (3) the circumflex,
which, as its form (^) shows, and as the ancient grammarians
inform us, is a combination of the rising and the falling
accent upon the same syllable, this syllable being always
long. Different Greek dialects, however, varied the syllables
of the word on which the accent occurred, Aeolic Greek,
for example, never putting the acute on the last syllable
of a word, while Attic Greek had many words so accented.
The pitch accent of the Indo-European languages was originally
free, i.e. might occur on any syllable of a word, and
this condition of things is still found in the earliest
Sanskrit literature. But in Greek before historical times
the accent had become limited to the last three syllables
of a word, so that a long word like the Homeric genitive
feromenoio could in no circumstances be accented on
either of its first two syllables, while if the final
syllable was long, as in the accusative plural feromenous,
the accent could go back only to the second syllable from
the end. As every vowel has its own natural pitch, and a
frequent interchange between e ( a high vowel) and o
(a low vowel) occurs in the Indo-European languages, it has
been suggested that e originally went with the highest
pitch accent, while o appeared in syllables of a lower
pitch. But if there is any foundation for the theory, which
is by no means certain, its effects have been distorted
and modified by all manner of analogical processes. Thus
poimen with acute accent and daimon with the acute accent
on the preceding syllable would correspond to the rule, so
would aletes and epos, but there are many exceptions
like odos where the acute accent accompanies an o
vowel. Somewhat similar distinctions characterize syllables
which are stressed. The strength of the expiration may be
greatest either at the beginning, the end or the middle of
the syllable, and, according as it is so, the accent is a
failing, a rising, or a rising and falling one. Syllables in
which the stress is produced continuously whether increasing
or decreasing are called single-pointed syllables, those in
which a variation in the stress occurs without being strong
enough to break the syllable into two are called double-pointed
syllables. These last occur in some English dialects, but
are commonest in languages like Swedish and Lithuanian, which
have a ``sing-song'' pronunciation. It is often not easy
to decide whether a syllable is double-pointed or whether
what we hear is really two-single-pointed syllables. There
is no separate notation for stress accent, but the acute (')
is used for the increasing, the grave (`) for the decreasing
stress, and the circumflex (^) for the rising and falling
(increasing and decreasing) and (@) for the opposite. A
separate notation is much to be desired, as the nature of the
two accents is so different, and could easily be devised by
using (@) for the falling, (') for the rising stress, and
(@) for the combination of the two in one syllable. This
would be clearer than the upright stroke (|) preceding the
stressed syllable, which is used in some phonetic works.
The relation between the two accents in the same language
at the same time is a subject which requires further
investigation. It is generally assumed that the chief stress
and the chief pitch in a word coincide, but this is by no
means certain for all cases, though the incidence of the chief
stress accent in modern Greek upon the same syllable as had
the chief pitch accent in ancient times suggests that the
two did frequently fall upon the same syllable. On the other
hand, in words like the Sanskrit sapta, the Gr. epta,
the pitch accent which those languages indicate is upon a
syllable which certainly, in the earliest times at least,
did not possess the principal stress. For forms in other
languages, like the Lat. septem or the Gothic sibun, show
that the a of the final syllables in Sanskrit and Greek is
the representative of a reduced syllable in which, even in the
earliest times, the nasal alone existed (see under N for the
history of these so-called sonant nasals). It is possible that
sporadic changes of accent, as in the Gr. meter compared
with the Sanskrit mata, is owing to the shifting of the
pitch accent to the same syllable as the stress occupied.
There is no lack of evidence to show that the stress accent
also may shift its position in the history of a language from
one syllable to another. In prehistoric times the stress
in Latin must have rested upon the first syllable in all
cases. Only on this hypothesis can be explained forms like
peperci (perfect of parco) and collido (a compound
of laedo). In historical times, when the stress in Latin
was on the second syllable from the end of the word if that
syllable was long, or on the third syllable from the end if
the second from the end was short, we should have expected
to find *peparci and *collaedo, for throughout the
historical period the stress rested in these words upon the
second syllable from the end. The causes for the change of
position are not always easy to ascertain. In words of four
syllables with a long penult and words of five syllables
with a short penult there probably developed a secondary
accent which in course of time replaced the earlier accent
upon the first syllable. But the number of such long words
