Tonal and stress accents

[petegray]

Jens said:
> There was stress before PIE, and stress
> after PIE, why not _in_ PIE?

I find this argument more persuasive than your earlier ones, Jens, but we
are still left with the evidence of Greek, which does not appear to have had
a stress accent until well after the classical period.   Sanskrit accent is
also described as pitch, but I know the details less well, and cannot argue
that stress is precluded by the evidence, the way I would wish to for Greek.
I know that the Sanskrit grammarians use only pitch terms, not stress, and
that there is no sign of the stress effects on adjacent syllables that we
would expect to find with a stress accent.

If these two languages did indeed have no stress accent, then your logic
seems shakier - it is not necessarily true that the PIE stress accent
continued unabated from the earliest time.

Peter