Tonal and stress accents

[Herb Stahlke]

>>> xiang at free.fr 03/16/00 05:15AM >>>

>> 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).

> 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.

A pitch accent can also turn into a lexical tone system as has happened in
Niger-Congo, where Bantu and Mande preserve pitch accent while western
Benue-Congo, Kwa, and Kru have a lot of lexical tone.  I'm curious what it was
about PIE pitch accent that none of the dialects became lexical tone languages.

Herb Stahlke