n of an underlying French
sentence.

Phonetically, the dialect offers certain marked differences when
contrasted with French. First of all is the forceful utterance of the
stressed syllable; the Provencal has post-tonic syllables, unlike the
sister-speech. Here it may be said to occupy a sort of middle position
between Italian and Spanish on the one hand, and French on the other;
for in the former languages the accent is found in all parts of the
word, in French practically only upon the final, and then it is
generally weak, so that the notion of a stress is almost lost. The
stress in Provencal is placed upon one of the last two syllables only,
and only three vowels, _e_, _i_, _o_, may follow the tonic syllable. The
language, therefore, has a cadence that affects the ear differently from
the French, and that resembles more that of the Italian or Spanish
languages.

The nasal vowels are again unlike those of the French language. The
vowel affected by the following nasal consonant preserves its own
quality of sound, and the consonant is pronounced; at the end of a word
both _m_ and _n_ are pronounced as _ng_ in the English word _ring_. The
Provencal utterance of _matin_, _tems_, is therefore quite unlike that
of the French _matin_, _temps_. This change of the nasal consonants
into the _ng_ sound whenever they become final occurs also in the
dialects of northern Italy and northern Spain. This pronunciation of the
nasal vowels in French is, as is well known, an important factor in the
famous "accent du Midi."

The oral vowels are in general like the French. It is curious that the
close _o_ is heard only in the infrequent diphthong _ou_, or as an
obscured, unaccented final. This absence of the close _o_ in the modern
language has led Mistral to believe that the close _o_ of Old Provencal
was pronounced like _ou_ in the modern dialect, which regularly
represents it. A second element of the "accent du Midi" just referred to
is the substitution of an open for a close _o_. The vowel sound of the
word _peur_ is not distinguished from the close sound in _peu_. In the
orthography of the Felibres the diagraph _ue_ is used as we find it in
Old French to represent this vowel. Probably the most striking feature
of the pronunciation is the unusual number of diphthongs and
triphthongs, both ascending and descending. Each vowel preserves its
proper sound, and the component vowels seem to be pronounced more slowly
and separately than i