(; "three- mora rule") is a linguistic rule proposed by

Hermann Hirt Hermann Hirt (19 December 1865 in Magdeburg – 12 September 1936 in Gießen) was a German philologist and Indo-Europeanist. Biography Hirt wrote on German metres (''Untersuchungen zur westgermanischen Verskunst'', 1889), edited Schopenhauer's ...

for placing the accent in a Germanic text. According to the rule, an

enclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

cannot be more than three morae in length. That is, three shorts, a long and a short, or a short and a long. Within a single word the most that can follow the accent is a long and a short.

Latin

There is a similar rule for a

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

word, the

penultimate rule Latin phonology continually evolved over the centuries, making it difficult for speakers in one era to know how Latin was spoken before then. A given phoneme may be represented by different letters in different periods. This article deals primar ...

: With few exceptions, Latin words are stressed on the penult (second-to-last syllable) if it is "heavy" (having a long vowel or diphthong or ending in a consonant), and on the antepenult (third-to-last syllable) if the penult is "light" (ending with a short vowel). Examples: #''Conditum'' "founded" = ''co•n—di—tum'' (heavy, light, final) = ''cónditum'' #''Condītum'' "seasoned" = ''co•n—di•i—tum'' (heavy, heavy, final) = ''condítum'' #''Conductum'' "brought together" = ''co•n—du•c—tum'' (heavy, heavy, final) =''condúctum'' (— marks a syllable boundary, • marks a mora boundary)

Moraic analysis of Latin

If one counts all "light" syllables as one mora and all "heavy" syllables as two morae, it becomes clear that the accent is essentially always placed three morae before the end of the word. Note, however, that for this analysis to work, one must always count the final syllable as one mora, regardless of its actual syllabic composition. Examples: #In ''condĭtum'' the third mora from the end is the ''n'' of the first syllable, so the accent falls on ''cón-'' #In ''condītum'' the third mora from the end is the first part of the ''ī'' in the second syllable, so the accent falls on ''dí-'' #In ''conductum'' the third mora from the end is the ''du'' of the second syllable, so the accent falls on ''duc-'' A somewhat different, and possibly more accurate, analysis is to consider the final syllable as extra metric; then the accent always falls on the syllable with the penult metric mora, and there is no need to define a special type of mora counting for the last syllable.

Other languages

Many other languages have similar but not identical rules for the placement of the accent: *

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

dialects (and certain other

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant ...

) originally used a similar rule, but this has been complicated by the loss of most final vowels. *

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...

(and certain other

Indo-Aryan languages The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, P ...

) use a version of this rule that allowed for placement on the fourth-to-last syllable if the antepenult was light. *

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...

had a totally different rule, but it likewise restricted the accent to the last three syllables and could be seen as mora-based. *In Japanese, the

pitch accent A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...

of the standard Tokyo dialect places the accent on the antepenultimate mora by default in loanwords. This has been argued to be the result of an underlying preference in Japanese for antepenultimate mora accentuation, with the exception of a certain phonological configuration (four-mora words ending in a sequence of light syllables and a non-

epenthetic In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epent ...

vowel) which loanwords are particularly unlikely to satisfy.

References

{{reflist Stress (linguistics)