In many [...] languages the single word is marked by a unifying accent, an emphasis on one of the syllables, to which the rest are subordinated. The particular syllable that is to be so distinguished is dependent [...] on the special genius of the language.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.35

There is [...] a striking accentual difference between a verbal form like eluthemen 'we were released,' accented on the second syllable of the word, and its participial derivative lutheis 'released,' accented on the last.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.79

[...] there is a growing tendency to throw the stress automatically on the first syllable of a word may eventually change the fundamental type of the language, reducing its final syllables to zero [...]
- Sapir (1921), a pag.174

Primitive Germanic 'fot(s)', 'fotiz', 'mus', 'musiz'; Indo-European 'pods', 'podes', 'mus', 'muses'. The vowels of the first syllables are all long.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.174

Tibetan was highly resistant to the polysyllabic words of Sanskrit because they could not automatically fall into significant syllables, as they should have in order to satisfy the Tibetan feeling for form.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.196

Quantitative verse was entirely natural to the Greeks [...] because alternations of long and short syllables were keenly live facts in the daily economy of the language. [...] . The tonal accents [...] helped to give the syllable its quantitative individuality.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.228

The dynamic basis of English is not quantity, but stress, the alternation of accented and unaccented syllables. [...]
- Sapir (1921), a pag.229

French prosody was compelled to develop on the basis of unit syllable-groups. Assonance, later rhyme, could not but prove a welcome [...] means of articulating or sectioning the somewhat spineless flow of sonorous syllables.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.229