Proparoxytone


Proparoxytone is a linguistic term for a word with stress on the antepenultimate syllable such as the English words "cinema" and "operational". Related terms are paroxytone and oxytone.
In English, most nouns of three or more syllables are proparoxytones, except in words ending in –tion or –sion, which tend to be paroxytones. This tendency is so strong in English that it frequently leads to the stress moving to a different part of the root in order to preserve an antepenultimate stress. For example, the root photograph gives rise to the nouns photography and photographer, family → familiar and familial.
In medieval Latin lyric poetry, a proparoxytonic line or half-line is one where the antepenultimate syllable is stressed, as in the first half of the verse "Estuans intrinsecus || ira vehementi."

Mentions in literature

offers an interesting use of the term in a footnote of his European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages. He is commenting on this passage from Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel's didactic poem on grammar:
Here is Curtius' note:

"Sad is the lot of the interjection, for of all the parts of speech it has the lowest place. There is none to praise it." On the way from Latin to French, the penultimate syllable of the proparoxytone succumbed. Mallarmé was so touched by this that he wrote a prose poem on the "Death of the Penultimate". It ends: Je m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnée à porter probablement le deuil de l'explicable Penultième.