In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...
, the ultima is the last
syllable of a word, the
penult is the next-to-last syllable, and the antepenult is third-from-last syllable. In a word of three syllables, the names of the syllables are antepenult-penult-ultima.
Etymology
Ultima comes from Latin ''ultima (syllaba)'' "last (syllable)". Penult and antepenult are abbreviations for ''paenultima'' and ''antepaenultima''. Penult has the prefix ''paene'' "almost", and antepenult has the prefix ''ante'' "before".
Classical languages
In
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the 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 the power ...
and
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 p ...
, only the three last syllables can be accented. In Latin, a word's
stress is dependent on the
weight
In science and engineering, the weight of an object is the force acting on the object due to gravity.
Some standard textbooks define weight as a vector quantity, the gravitational force acting on the object. Others define weight as a scalar q ...
or length of the penultimate syllable; in Greek, the place and type of accent is dependent on the length of the vowel in the ultima.
See also
*
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 ...
**
Acute accent
***
Oxytone,
paroxytone,
proparoxytone
**
Circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
***
Perispomenon, properispomenon
**
Grave accent
***
Barytone
*
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually, the exact same phonemes) in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic ...
*
Stress (linguistics)
*
Syllable
References
*
Herbert Weir Smyth. ''Greek Grammar''
par. 166, 167
Phonology
Greek grammar
Ancient Greek
{{Latin-stub