where did you get the Quintilian text from which you quoted? I can't seem to find it online.
Look
here.
Well, which one is it? If syncopes can occur in languages that have no stress accent, then you can't claim they are proof of a language having a stress accent.
This is strictly-speaking true. But I was trying to be nuanced. Syncope is strongly associated with stress-accent languages, to the extent that Adams (Social Variation and the Latin Language, p90) straight out says 'Syncope is the loss of short unaccented vowels in a language with a stress accent.' The fact that there are roughly three common examples in Greek, compared to hundreds of examples in Latin, is a good indication that Latin has a stress-accent.
Thanks again for all the work ... but if I take Quintilian (and Capella, which I admittedly only had a brief look at) at face value, it sounds to me like he's pretty much describing a pitch accent for the Latin language that falls on either the penultimate syllable or the one before that. For him to be talking about a stress-accent, you would have to come up with a number of additional hypotheses; mainly that he was blindly following a Greek model and that he had no idea that Greek had a pitch accent once – and even if all of them are true, it would still seem strang why he is making a difference between 'media longa', 'acuta' and '[circum-]flexa' when the description of a stress accent would have no need of such a distinction — and also why he is making the disctinction by using aut rather than vel when, as you say, the terms pretty much meant the same thing.
I do wonder what all that talk by Latin grammarians of acute, grave and circumflex accents is about. At first sight, it would indeed seem to imply a pitch accent like in Greek. How do we know it isn't the case?
I don't know anymore on this than Iáson does, but I can only add that, as far as I remember, Allen (Vox Latina) says (in the chapter on accent) that there are now more than enough proofs that the Roman terminology like "accent" (=accompanying singing) or "circumflex", "acute" etc. is a Greek borrowing, forcing the Greek prosody (including the word prosody itself) - the Greek three accents onto Latin which most probably had only one and since even the word "accent" is likely forced too, it may have nothing to do with singing (pitch) either [not sure if those are the exact words really], then the best guess is non-singing -> stress.
The words used by the grammarians do indeed imply a pitch accent, and suggest a distinction between acute and circumflex.
Most linguists nowadays, as far as I know, think that this is a misunderstanding based on applying Greek terminology to Latin. The terms the grammarians use are direct translations from the Greek: acūta (ὀξεῖα), accentus (προσῳδία), (circum)flexa (περισπωμένη), gravis (βαρεῖα). This is pretty much what happened in the rest of Latin grammatical terminology, and is paralleled elsewhere when the terminology used to describe one language is transferred to another. cf.
pp282-8 of the Latin Grammarians book, which for me at least shows up in the preview.
As is frequently brought up nowadays, it is very rare for an accent to be
wholly pitch-based or
wholly stress-based; usually there is an element of both involved - although we can still meaningfully call eg. English a stress accent language. So it's probable that the Latin accent included some element of pitch, which eased the adoption of the Greek terminology, whilst still being a stress accent.
By the time Varro or Quintilian was writing, it is quite probable (from Greek linguistics) that the pitch accent had been mainly lost in Greek, replaced by a stress accent. So if they were to read the account of a Greek grammarian and listen to Greek being spoken by native speakers, then when they came to apply the same terms to describe Latin, they would naturally use them to describe the Latin stress accent much as they heard them used to describe the Greek stress accent.
I guess I can't think of an absolutely fool-proof argument that the Greek pitch accent didn't survive a little longer and the Latin accent wasn't primarily a pitch accent (except for the argument about syncope, and perhaps the fact that there are no pitch accents in any Romance languages). But I'm not sure it helps your argument very much (depending on quite what you're arguing at this stage), once you've accepted that there was an accent of some form on the penult or antepenult according to the rule.
Good luck pronouncing Latin with a pitch accent...
And if it isn't, what did they mean by acute, grave and circumflex accents? — Well, to be fair, as far as I know we aren't even sure what they meant in Greek.
In Classical Greek, the acute accent signifies a higher pitch on a short vowel, or a higher pitch on the last mora of a long vowel or diphthong. A circumflex accent signifies a higher pitch on the first mora of a long vowel or diphthong. After the point of higher pitch, there was likely a fall in pitch. A grave accent is probably either a slightly higher pitch (but not quite on the level of an acute) or just a sign that the pitch continued to rise. It's not unlike the 'downstep' in Tokyo Japanese. In modern Greek, the accent is one of stress, but it took until the 20th century for the acute-circumflex-grave writing system to be replaced by just acute accents.
That's not a convincing argument. If you claim that a language had a stress-timed accent
considering Latin wasn't a stress-timed language.
I'm not claiming that Latin was a
stress-timed language, I'm claiming that it had a
stress accent. I would guess that Latin was probably syllable-timed or mora-timed (cf. Czech).
That's not a convincing argument. If you claim that a language had a stress-timed accent with the antepenultima-rules postulated for Latin, you are bound to run into coincidental aligment between verse accent and what you might call 'natural accent' in any metre.
So you think that the correlation in the last part of the hexameter in Augustan poetry is a chance coincidence? If so, why is it more true for later poets than in Ennius, and why specifically in the last two feet of the line?
You would have to be able to account for the exception that occured on more than a regular base, e.g. for Plautus and Terence having a substantial number of lines ending in two-syllable words ... and you can't.
I don't understand what you mean here. Perhaps restate it in different words?
NB. you would also have to account for the fact why that language didn't just start producing stress-timed poetry at least at *some* point
Why should it, when the influence of Greek culture was so strong? We know very little about 'native' Latin poetry; as Pacifica said, it was suggested at one time that Saturnians were based on accent. Considering that the stress accent used to be on the first syllable in the prehistoric period, the Classical Latin accent must be 'relatively' recent, though, making this less plausible.
He's completely wrong with respect to hexameters. Augustean poetry did a much better job at having the verse accent coincide with the pitch accent than Ennius did. In Ennius's times, it was still acceptable to end an hexameter with a monosyllabic word:
unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem (only 2/6, 33%, coincide with what is believed to be the natural accent)
[...] saxo cere comminuit brum (as far as I know, the first half of that hexameter is lost ... but the second half coincides at 0%)
In the last two feet, yes. But I think Sihler's idea is that Ennius' poetry has a greater tendency to overall agreement between ictus and stress accent, whereas Augustan poetry intentionally avoids coincidence of ictus and stress accent in the first four feet, whilst encouraging it in the last two.
As I said, Sihler is not reliable, and doesn't cite sources. I suspect this might come from the statistical study of
Sturtevant (1919). Even Ennius (p379) exhibits some tendency towards agreement in the last two feet.
(which is not just a feature of Plautus's poetry, but of Latin in general)
Quite, but it is considerably more productive in Plautus (it affects new words and phrases rather than specific words, as far as I remember).
Iambic shortening (which is not just a feature of Plautus's poetry, but of Latin in general) simply means that in iambic words the second syllable gets shortened. As with the syncope phenomenon, there is no evidence that stress is the cause for that ... and it probably wasn't considering Latin wasn't a stress-timed language.
The role of stress in iambic shortening is complicated. There's a very short article
here which has so much linguistic terminology in it that you'll undoubtably dismiss it without consideration (to be fair, I don't fully understand it, so it may go either way). But there is some relationship: stressed syllables (according to the rule) are not shortened.