Tonal and stress accents

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

"Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be> wrote:

>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: Valhncia (e-gravis), but: Gandma
>(i-acutus). Maybe Miguel Carrasquer can tell us more about Catalan
>accentuation.

As far as I know, Catalan has nothing but a stress accent.  The
orthographic accent is used to mark "unusually" stressed
syllables (according to a system of diacritic-avoidance in
general not unlike that of Castilian, although different in most
of the details [e.g. it's Valencia and Gandi'a in Castilian, but
Vale`ncia and Gandia in Catalan]).  The letter "a" is always
marked with a grave, the letters "i" and "u" invariably with an
acute, while "e" and "o" are marked with one or the other,
depending on the quality of the vowel (/e/ ~ /E/, /o/ ~ /O/).  As
far as Valencian goes, [e] and [E] are not phonemes (not sure
about [o] and [O], but I could look it up if anybody is
interested), so strictly speaking Val`encia might as well be
Vale'ncia, in Valencian that is.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl