Words & WritingGreek → English
Prosody
/ˈprɒsədi/noun
The patterns of rhythm, stress and pitch in speech or verse.
The Greek roots
πρός
prós
toward, in addition
ᾠδή
ōidḗ
song
Literally: “a song added to words”
The story of the word
προσῳδία meant the song that comes with the speaking, and in Greek it named the pitch accents written over vowels, the marks that told a reader where the voice rose. English took it for metre and stress in poetry. Linguists then widened it again to cover the melody of ordinary talk, which is how a phonetician ends up writing seriously about the prosody of a shopping list.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
Same family
odemelodyparodyrhapsodypalinode
In a sentence
The translation keeps the sense and loses the prosody entirely.
Infants pick up the prosody of their language months before the words.