Tonal and stress accents

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Jose Perez (jose.perez3 at yucom.be) wrote:

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

Well, 26.5 years ago I studied phonetics with Ilse Lehiste, author of a book
entitled _Suprasegmentals_, who taught us that stress accents involved all of
pitch, amplitude, and duration, thereby differing from pitch or tone (which are
not the same thing, by the way:  Greek and Vedic, Lithuanian and South Slavic,
had or have *pitch*, not *tone*, accents).

Several years later, I did a year of experimental phonetics, including work on
stressed vs. unstressed syllables that was published in the Chicago Linguistics
Society volume for 1978.

> 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?

Prof. Lehiste is also known as the co-author, with the late Robert Jeffers, of
_Principles and Methods for Historical Linguistics_; before her graduate work
in phonetics, she obtained a D. Phil. in historical linguistics at Hamburg.

> Or am I still missing the obvious?

								Rich Alderson