The d[’i]vine Desdemona,

though Shakespeare nowhere else has this stress, while Shelley has.  Shelley, too, has

  She cannot know how well the s[’u]pine slaves
  Of blind authority read the truth of things.

The grammatical term, too, is ‘s[’u]pine’.  Later introductions also have this stress, as ‘b[’o]vine’, ‘c[’a]nine’, ‘[’e]quine’.  The last word is not always understood.  At any rate Halliwell-Phillips, referring to a well-known story of Shakespeare’s youth, says that the poet probably attended the theatre ‘in some equine capacity’.  As it is agreed that ‘bovine’ and ‘equine’ lengthen the former vowel, we ought by analogy to say ‘c[=a]nine’, as probably most people do.  Words of more than two syllables have the stress on the antepenultima and the vowel is short, as in ‘libertine’, ‘adulterine’, but of course ‘[=u]terine’.  When heavy consonants bring the stress on to the penultima, the i is shortened, as in ‘clandest[)i]n(e)’, ‘intest[)i]n(e)’, and so in like disyllables, as ‘doctr[)i]n(e)’.  The modern words ‘morphin(e)’ and ‘strychnin(e)’, coined, the one from Morpheus and the other from the Greek name of the plant known to botanists as Withania somnifera, correctly follow ‘doctrine’ in shortening the i, though another pronunciation is sometimes heard.

STEMS IN -TUDIN.  These shorten the antepenultima, as ‘plenitude’, ‘solitude’, with the usual exceptions, such as ‘fortitude’.

STEMS IN -TION.  These words retain the suffix, which in early days was disyllabic, as it sometimes is in Shakespeare, for instance in Portia’s

  Before a friend of this descripti[’o]n
  Shall lose a hair through Bassanio’s fault.

Thus they came under the ‘alias’ rule, and what is now the penultimate vowel is long unless it be i.  Examples are ‘nation’, ‘accretion’, ‘emotion’, ‘solution’, while i is shortened in ‘petition’, ‘munition’, and the like, and left short in ‘admonition’ and others.  In military use an exception is made by ‘ration’, but the pronunciation is confined to one sense of the word, and is new at that.  I remember old soldiers of George III who spoke of ‘r[=a]tions’.  Perhaps the ugly change is due to French influence.

Originally the adjectives from these words must have lengthened the fourth vowel from the end long, as n[=a]t[)i][)o]nal, but when ti became sh they came to follow the rule of Latin trisyllables in our pronunciation.

STEMS IN -IC.  Of these words we have a good many, both Latin and Greek.  Those that came direct keep the stress on the vowel which was antepenultimate and is in English penultimate, and this vowel is short whatever its original quantity.  Examples are ‘aquatic’, ‘italic’, ‘Germanic’.  Words that came through French threw the stress back, as ‘l[’u]natic’.  Skeat says that ‘fanatic’ came through French, but he can hardly be right, for the pronunciation ‘f[’a]natic’ is barely three score years old.  There is no inverted stress in Milton’s