Tonal and stress accents

[jose.perez3]

>> From: "Miguel Carrasquer Vidal" <mcv at wxs.nl>

>> I think we are probably dealing with two different "accents": 1)
>> stress-accent, which produces full- and zero-grade forms; 2) tonal accent,
>> which produces *e/*o variations.

> That is often said, but it needs to be elaborated for it to make
> sense.  Did (Pre-)PIE have simultaneous stress accent and tonal
> accent, or did it switch from one to the other in the course of
> its development?  If it switched from stress accent to pitch
> accent (as suggested by zero grade everywhere and Vedic-Greek
> accentuation), how did the unstressed vowels that were to become
> o's by pitch accent survive the reduction caused by stress
> accent? Etcetera.

I'd be very thankful for anybody who has paid attention to the issue of tonal
and stress accent to elaborate on this subject, presenting some sound
information about how we think that IE differed from most modern European
languages in its accent.

Is there still anybody around there who thinks that most modern languages have
"stress accents"? Has anybody checked on this with expert phoneticians?

When I studied Classics, my teachers explained to me that Classical Latin had
stress accents but that they named them with "musical" terms because they were
"copying" Greek grammarians.

The problem is that to my (admittedly poorly trained) ears Modern Greek has a
tonal accent, so I don't see what has changed about that ever since Homer. All
Romance languages have tonal accents (pronounce any of them taking away any
stress from the accented sylables and the change of tone will still indicate
where it goes)... so how was Latin different from them?? The same applies to
modern Germanic and Slavic languages. In fact I'm still waiting to come across
the proverbial language with pitched non tonal accent to begin to fathom what
the whole story is about.

Could it be that comparative linguists pulled this rabbit out of the hat
without checking with phoneticians without realising that they might be rather
tone deaf?

Or am I still missing the obvious?

                    Joe