Open Issues of Stress Placement in Classical Names

Abstract

The paper begins by describing the author’s experiences with the Rules of the Slovene Orthography (1987), a project in which he participated for several years, counselling, for example, against such hybrid possessive adjectives in Slovene as Horačev (‘of Horace’), Properčev (‘of Propertius’), Leibničev (‘of Leibniz’), etc. There follows an analysis of the dilemmas raised by stress placement in classical names, both geographical and personal: dilemmas surprisingly reminiscent of those encountered by classical and later grammarians in stressing Greek names in the Latin language. Indeed, the Slovene tradition has sometimes adopted the Latin stress even with names of Greek origin, and in some cases the established stress is grounded neither in Greek nor Latin but rather borrowed from French or German. For frequently used and long-Slovenised classical names, the author advocates the preservation of the established stress. With names more rarely used, however, experts should be granted the right to keep the original stress without the stigma of ‘literalness’, which excludes this practice from the living language organism. Above all, the paper argues for the right of literary translators to adapt the stress of personal names in poetry translation to the rhythm and rules of the hexameter or other classical metrical schemes.