Tonal and stress accents

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Herb Stahlke" <HSTAHLKE at gw.bsu.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2000 4:28 PM

>>>> 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

[Ed]
Without pretending to prove anything, I would like to add some information:

Contrary to Castilian stress accent marking, Valencian Catalan uses two
different diacritics to mark stress: acutus for a rising pitch on the stressed
syllable, gravis for the descending pitch: València (e-gravis), but: Gandía
(i-acutus). Maybe Miguel Carrasquer can tell us more about Catalan
accentuation.

This pitch is not lexical, only contextual in relation with the stressed
syllable; only the position of the stress may have lexical implications, like
in English, e.g. ((a) record, (to) record).

Ed.