🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan24.114225.28870@enea.se>, sommar@enea (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.

Your very well-informed guess is correct.

>>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?)

That is correct.  The grammarian Dionysios of Halicarnassos described the
accents of his time fairly carefully, using terminology which he explicitly
imported from music:  That the acute was a rise of a musical fifth, that the
grave was a lowering of the "tonos" = "musical pitch," and that the circumflex
was a fall after a rise.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_