🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan24.114225.28870@enea.se>, sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
> 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.

Right.  "Tone" is reserved for describing systems such as that of
Chinese.  Swedish, like other Germanic languages, has a dynamic (stress)
accent.  At least: it's *primarily* one of stress: a stressed syllable
is louder, or at least, is perceived as louder.  But a pure stress
system probably doesn't exist: there is always a pitch contour involved
as well.  Swedish and Norwegian are unusual among Germanic languages
in that there is more than one possible pitch contour, and they contrast.
English has pitch contours too, but any variation never involves a
contrast.  Or in other words, if you change the pitch contour, you
still have the same word in English.  You wouldn't in Swedish or
Norwegian.

>>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?)

Ancient Greek apparently had a pitch accent, with two or three (depending
on what you do with the grave) contrasting contours.  If this syllable
was louder, it was apparently not perceived as such, which is why the 
vowels in unstressed syllable aren't reduced, and the stress was totally
ignored in poetry.

As I already explained, the contrasting contours of Greek seem to be a
peculiarly Greek development.  Late Indo-European probably had a pitch
accent, but without the contrasting contours.

All Germanic languages have abandoned the Indo-European accent system,
replacing it with a strong dynamic accent on the first syllable (except
that verb prefixes were not stressed; noun prefixes were).  So the Swedish
system has nothing whatsoever to do with the Indo-European one.

--Leo Connolly