🚀 go-pugleaf

Rich Alderson (alderson@cisco.com) writes:
>First, lets make our terminology more precise:  Lithuanian, Latvian, certain
>Slavic languages, ancient Greek, and Vedic Sanskrit are supposed to have (or
>have had) *pitch contours*, rather than *tones* as that term is usually used.

So let me ignorant layman ask: how would you describe the two
different accents in Swedish, are they tones or pitch contours?
Not that I'm questioning anything, I just want to be able to relate
to something I know. From where you wrote elsewhere, I would guess
the answer in the latter.

>The final upshot of all this is that we usually reconstruct the PIE accent
>as a pitch rise based on the Greek and Sanskrit evidence for its pitch nature.
>In addition, the oldest Indo-European languages do not show the kinds of vowel
>reductions we expect from a stress accent, as in the history of Germanic or
>Latin, or the Romance languages.

Again, I want something to relate to. Do I understand right that none of
the accents in ancient Greek are the same as the one single accent as
Romance and West-Germanic languages? (And which is one of the two
possible in Swedish?)

(Of course, I could have mailed these questions to Rich directly, but
I figured that there might be more ignorant and interested laymen around.)
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se