Tonal and stress accents

petegray petegray at btinternet.com
Wed Mar 15 21:01:08 UTC 2000


Joe said:

>Is there still anybody around there who thinks that ...  modern languages have
>"stress accents"?

This is new to me, Joe, and a little puzzling.   English intonation patterns
do seem to involve a greater forcefulness of articulation on the syllabic
peak we call "stressed", while the pitch can be level, higher, or lower.
Am I deceived here?   Furthermore, you seem to be denying the validity of
this, and also the validity of the opposite point of view,  when you suggest
there is no such thing as "pitched non-tonal accent".    So I feel puzzled,
both by your logic, and because I believe some languages, such as Swedish,
have a fixed pitch pattern for words, without which the word is not
understood.

>  When I studied Classics, ...

You seemed in that paragraph to be denying that the Greek and Latin accents
were different.   They certainly function very differently, precisely in
line with the old ideas concerning "stess" and "pitch" accents.   Latin
accent causes syncope, Greek does not;  Latin accent becomes related to
metre (producing effects of syncopation or coincidence), Greek accent is
totally irrelveant to metre;   Latin has early non-syllabic count verse with
a regular number of accented syllables (like the old Anglo-saxon verse) but
Greek only ever shows syllable-count verse (like modern Romance languages),
and so on.

> Modern Greek ...

Greek (according to the usual theory) lost the pitch accent sometime in the
last centuries BC, and developed a stress accent - hence:
    (a) the need for accents to be marked.   You know that Greek - even
Modern Greek - preserves the accent in the same position, so why was there a
need to mark the accent, if its position was known, unless there was other
information being indicated - such as the three-fold distinction in pitch
pattern?
   (b) The Greeks themselves were now using the old musical terminology for
their new stress accent - The Romans simply borrowed the terms, and used
them precisely as the Greeks were doing.

But I am only repeating what I have never before heard questioned - so
please tell us more, Joe.

Peter



More information about the Indo-european mailing list