We noticed above that the final consonant was exposed to danger by the fact that the syllable containing it was never protected by the accent.  It is also true that there was a tendency to do away with any difficult combination of consonants.  We recall in English the current pronunciations, “February,” and “Calwell” for Caldwell.  The average Roman in the same way was inclined to follow the line of least resistance.  Sometimes, as in the two English examples just given, he avoided a difficult combination of consonants by dropping one of them.  This method he followed in saying santus for sanctus, and scriserunt for scripserunt, just as in vulgar English one now and then hears “slep” and “kep” for the more difficult “slept” and “kept.”  Sometimes he lightened the pronunciation by metathesis, as he did when he pronounced interpretor as interpertor.  A third device was to insert a vowel, as illiterate English-speaking people do in the pronunciations “ellum” and “Henery.”  In this way, for instance, the Roman avoided the difficult combinations -mn-and -chn- by saying mina and techina for the historically correct mna and techna.  Another method of surmounting the difficulty was to assimilate one of the two consonants to the other.  This is a favorite practice of the shop-girl, over which the newspapers make merry in their phonetical reproductions of supposed conversations heard from behind the counter.  Adopting the same easy way of speaking, the uneducated Roman sometimes said isse for ipse, and scritus for scriptus.  To pass to another point of difference, the laws determining the incidence of the accent were very firmly established in literary Latin.  The accent must fall on the penult, if it was long, otherwise on the antepenult of the word.  But in popular Latin there were certain classes of words in whose case these principles were not observed.

The very nature of the accent probably differed in the two forms of speech.  In preliterary Latin the stress was undoubtedly a marked feature of the accent, and this continued to be the case in the popular speech throughout the entire history of the language, but, as I have tried to prove in another paper,[21] in formal Latin the stress became very slight, and the pitch grew to be the characteristic feature of the accent.  Consequently, when Virgil read a passage of the AEneid to Augustus and Livia the effect on the ear of the comparatively unstressed language, with the rhythmical rise and fall of the pitch, would have been very different from that made by the conversation of the average man, with the accented syllables more clearly marked by a stress.