e breath, rendering it emphatic.

These quantities are prominent features in the formal portions of the
language, characterizing inflections and declinations. No common
means of designating them have been adopted by the grammarians, and
for my present purpose, I shall make use of the following signs:--

[)a] , short.

a , intermediate.

[=a] , long.

a , with stress.

The general prosodic rules are:--

1. In polysyllabic words in which there are no long vowels, all the
vowels are intermediate.

2. The vowels are long in the penultimate of the plurals of the
imperatives when the preterit of the verb ends in a vowel; the _[=a]_
of the _c[=a]n_ of the imperatives; the _[=i]_ of the _t[=i]_; of the
gerundives; the last vowel of the futures when the verb loses a vowel
to form them; the penultimates of passives in _lo_, of impersonals,
of verbals in _oni_, _illi_, _olli_ and _oca_, of verbal nouns with
the terminations _yan_ and _can_; the _[=o]_ of abstract nouns in
_otl_ in composition; and those derived from long syllables.

3. Vowels are "with stress" when they are the finals in the plurals
of nouns and verbs, also in the perfect preterite, in possessives
ending in a, e, o, and in the penultimate of nouns ending in _tli_,
_tla_ and _tle_ when these syllables are immediately preceded by the
vowel.[22]

The practical importance of these distinctions may be illustrated by
the following examples:--

_tatli_, = father.

_t[=a]tl[)i]_, = thou drinkest.

_t[=a]tli_, = we drink.

It is, however, evident from this example that the quantity of
Nahuatl syllables enters too much into the strictly formal part of
the language for rules of position, such as some of those above
given, to be binding; and doubtless for this reason the eminent
grammarian Carlos de Tapia Zenteno, who was professor of the tongue
in the University of Mexico, denies that it can be reduced to
definite rules of prosody like those of the Latin.[23]

Substituting accent for quantity, there would seem to be an iambic
character to the songs. Thus the first words of Song I, were probably
chanted:--

_Nino' yolno' notza' campa' nic[)u] iz' yec tli' ahui aca' xochitl'_:
etc.

But the directions given for the drums at the beginning of Songs
XVIII, XIX, etc., do not indicate a continuance of these feet, but of
others, as in XIX:--

u--, u--, u--, uu--, u--, u--, u--, etc.

Indeed, we may suppose