Word: circumflex
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...third is a commatic chorus; and here a few words of explanation are needed. Mr. White is authority for the statement that in ordinary prose speaking, and also in metrical recitation, outside of the choruses, the syllables marked with acute accents, with circumflex accents, and with grave accents, were distinguished from one another and from unaccented syllables by a difference of pitch, confined within the interval known as a third. This difference of pitch is not wholly foreign to our own accentuation, but it was much more marked among Greeks, and resulted in a sort of sing-song tone...