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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: "pitch accent" vs. "tone"
In-Reply-To: cq315@FreeNet.Carleton.CA's message of Sat, 17 Feb 1996 03:30:33 GMT
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Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 23:21:37 GMT
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In article <DMwHqx.8CF@freenet.carleton.ca> cq315@FreeNet.Carleton.CA
(Hank Walker) writes:

>In pitch languages, a vowel will be coupled with a pitch in a one to one
>ratio.

[example elided  --rma]

>The key difference between this and a tone language is simply the fact that
>tone languages allow two or more values for pitch to be associated with
>(attatched to) the segments (sounds).

I'm sorry, but this is wrong.  Classical Greek, for example, was a pitch
language (as I defined such in a previous post), with a complex set of pitch
accents depending on vowel length:

0.  There is only one accent per word; a few words bear *no* accent.  It falls
    no further from the end of the word than the third syllable.
1.  A short vowel may receive the high pitch (acute accent) or no accent.
2.  A long vowel may receive the high pitch, or a rising-falling pitch (circum-
    flex accent).
3.  Accents are subject to modification:
    a.  A final acute is lowered but still higher than no accent (barytone or
	grave accent) if another accented word follows.
    b.  If a long vowel is accented and followed by a short vowel, the accent
	is *always* circumflex; if by a long vowel, it is *always* acute.

>I don't know about Norwegian, but Swedish, Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian are
>the only Indo-European languages that still have the last vestiges of the old
>Proto-Indo-European pitch system which has disappeared (along with
>pharyngeals, the deep 'h' sounds that occur in Arabic), at least according to
>one theory.

The extant Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian, both show the PIE accent
as clearly as the Slavic languages you mention.

The Swedish accent is *NOT* related to the PIE accent; it is, rather, entirely
a Swedish development, not even directly related to the similar development in
Norwegian.

We do, of course, have the evidence of Classical Greek and of Vedic Sanskrit,
as well as the indirect evidence of Verner's Law in Germanic, but I assume you
were speaking of currently spoken languages.

I'm not sure what you mean about pharyngeals in Proto-Indo-European.  The
hypothetical class of consonants in PIE is referred to as "laryngeals"; some of
us think that some of them were pharyngals, but not necessarily of them.  And I
don't think you mean to imply, as your phrasing does, that reflexes of the
laryngeals exist as such in modern languages.  What *did* you mean to say?
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
