Tonal and stress accents

[Guillaume JACQUES]

> 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

First of all, modern greek, if I am not mistaken, lost vocalic length. In
ancient greek you had in fact just one accent (high pitch) but it could fall on
the first or on the second mora of a long vowel so you had rising and falling
long vowels.  I don't quite understand the way you use 'tonal' accent. Aren't
you mistaking pitch and intensity ?  In French, for example, (very roughly) we
have an accent of intensity and length on the last syllable of a phonological
word, and a high pitch on the *first* syllable of a word (unless it is a
grammatical word).  Of course in many languages, the three factors : intensity,
pitch and length (as well as a difference in formants; the unstressed syllable
tend to be centralised, to have a lower F2 and a higher F1).may be mixed up.  I
think you should listen to Lithuanian or South Slavic dialects if you want an
idea of a pitch accent language. And, of course, I think you should listen to
asian tonal languages. If think that greek rising accent (as in hEgemO/n
"chief") sounded much like a rising tone and the falling accent (as in ei~mi "I
go", timO~ "I fear"). But greek pitch accent was only superficially similar to
asian tone languages because it had just one tonal feature.

Guillaume