Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.

Again our teacher must not tolerate the affected pronunciation of s [*]( Quintilian perhaps alludes to the habit of prefixing i to initial st, sp, sc found in inscriptions of the later Empire. See Lindsay, op. cit. p. 102. ) with which we are painfully familiar, nor suffer words to be uttered from the depths of the throat or

v1-3 p.187

rolled out hollow-mouthed, or permit the natural sound of the voice to be over-laid with a fuller sound, a fault fatal to purity of speech; the Greeks give this peculiarity the name καταπεπλασμένον (plastered over), a term applied to the tone produced by a pipe,

when the stops which produce the treble notes are closed, and a bass note is produced through the main aperture only.

He will also see that final syllables are not clipped, that the quality of speech is continuously maintained, that when the voice is raised, the strain falls upon the lungs and not the mouth, and that gesture and voice are mutually appropriate.