Proparoxytone
Proparoxytone (, ) is a linguistic term for a word with stress on the antepenultimate (third last) syllable such as the English words "cinema" and "operational". Related terms are paroxytone (stress on the penultimate syllable) and oxytone (stress on the last syllable). In English, most nouns of three or more syllables are proparoxytones, except in words ending in "–tion" or "–sion", which tend to be paroxytones ("operation", "equivocation", "television"). This tendency is so strong in English that it frequently leads to the stress moving to a different part of the root in order to preserve an antepenultimate stress. For example, the  root photograph gives rise to the nouns photography and photographer, "family" → "familiar" and "familial". (In many dialects of English, the "i" in "family" is even deleted entirely, and still has the stressed in "familial" and "familiar") In medieval Latin lyric poetry, a "proparoxytonic" line or half-line is one where the antepenultimate syllable is stressed, as in the first half of the verse "Estuans intrinsecus || ira vehementi." Mentions in literature. Ernst Robert Curtius offers an interesting use of the term in a footnote (Ch. 8, n. 33) of his "European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages". He is  commenting on this passage from Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel's didactic poem on grammar: Here is Curtius' note: Sad is the lot of the interjection, for of all the parts of speech it has the lowest place. There is none to praise it." On the way from Latin to French, the penultimate syllable of the proparoxytone succumbed. Mallarmé was so touched by this that he wrote a prose poem on the "Death of the Penultimate" ( in ). It ends: (Eerie, I flee: likely some (no-)one doomed to wear weeds for the explainable second-last.)