Tonal and stress accents

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Guillaume JACQUES wrote:

[Quoting me (JER) on pitch and stress in IE]

>> [...] In PIE the two must have gone hand in hand, i.e. there was a
>> "prominent" syllable in every word, its prominence consisting in high tone
>> AND stress (greater muscular effort giving a louder sound volume).

> I don't quite follow you here. A pitch accent can change into an intensity
> accent.  This is what happened in greek and slavic, and I suppose in the
> other less archaic languages that you cite from.  It isn't necessary to
> assume IE had both accents. I think greek, vedic, baltic and slavic evidence
> indicates PIE had a pitch accent.

Fine, they do point to a pitch accent, but later stages show stress in the
same position, and so does the IE ablaut for an _earlier_ period. Does the
vanishing of unaccented short vowels in pre-PIE not count for anything in
discussions about the nature of the PIE accent? I would say, if there was
stress before we find pitch, and there is also stress after the pitch
period, the most reasonable inference would be that there was stress also
at the time of the pitch accent? There was stress before PIE, and stress
after PIE, why not _in_ PIE?

Jens