Tonal and stress accents

[Patrick C. Ryan]

Dear Jens and IEists:

 ----- Original Message -----
From: "Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen" <jer at cphling.dk>
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 12:30 AM

[ moderator snip ]

> I do not think it differed very much: As your mail continues, there is a
> high pitch on the stress in Modern Greek too, and the same goes for
> Italian. 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).
>    Why must that be so?
>    A. HIGH PITCH is secured for PIE by:
>       A.1. The Sanskrit term uda:tta 'elevated' used of the prominent
>            syllable in Vedic.
>       A.2. Greek grammarians' report of a manifestly higher pitch on the
>            prominent syllable.
>       A.3. In Balto-Slavic, a short diphthong (and a short vowel) has
>            falling tone, whereas as long diphthong (and an old long
>            vowel) has rising tone: The prominence is on the
>            beginning of the last full-vowel mora of a syllable. That
>            can be achieved only by assigning high pitch to the most
>            prominent part of the syllable.
>       A.4. The Slavic, after many changes, the basic accent habit remain
>            the same: There is high pitch on the formerly prominent
>            syllable in Stokavian Serbocroatian, even after the stress
>            itself has been retracted (to the preceding syllable)
>    from the syllable still accented in Cakavian and Russian.
>    B. STRESS on the same segment is secured by:
>       B.1. The stress accent of Pashto which basically falls on the
>    same syllable as the Vedic uda:tta.
>       B.2. The stress accent of Modern Greek which is still on the
>            syllable accented in Ancient Greek.
>       B.3. The stress of Russian and Cakavian which falls on the syllable
>    carrying high pitch in Stokavian.
>       B.4. The Hittite plene writing of originally short vowels in
>            accented position, which points to volume, not pitch. The
>            effects on the consonantism which is reduced after long
>            vowels are the same in Luvian and Lycian as in Hittite.
>       B.5. The Lydian vowel reductions in unaccented position observed
>            by Eichner.
>       B.6. The loss of unaccented vowels in Albanian numerals where
>            reductions appear to have taken place so early that the
>            relevant accent was still that of PIE, while in the bulk
>            of the vocabulary reductions postdate a more automatic
>            accent assignment.

> There are certainly other indications, but this will suffice to show that
> the two features (high pitch and stress) went together in PIE already.

I do not wish to dispute the particular examples you have given but I would
like to call attention to the fact that stress and tone do *not* necessarily
go together in English.

In a sentence like: "I have the receipt", the final syllable has
stress-accent and falling tone.

In my opinion, the original function of stress was to delimit phrases while
the original function of tone was to delimit sentences.

Pat

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