Tonal and stress accents

[Simona Klemencic]

To Jose Perez:

If I've got you right you are saying that the stress accent doesn't really
exist? Maybe I can add something here as a native speaker of a language in
which both, stress and tonic accent exist. Namely, in Slovene (Slovenian)
one part of the speakers (mostly Lower and Upper Carniola) still speak in
the tonic (musical) way of accentuation, inherited from the Common Slavic
language. The others have lost it; we speak the dinamic/stress version of
Slovene. There's an obvious difference. In the melodic accentuation,
different tonemes can change the meaning of a word - for example: "peta"
with a circumflexed e means 'a heel' while "peta" with an acuted e means
'sung'. I think this is the whole point of the melodic accent while we
others cannot even hear these differences.

Greetings,
Simona Klemencic