Did you know...

[pne]

...that Swedish is tonal?

I'm not sure how many Indo-European languages are; my guess would be not all that many.

I forgot what the Swedish tones are called; I think they're just called "tone A" and "tone B" or something like that. I'm not sure whether they only apply to two-syllable words or also to others.

I do know that they let you distinguish between Anden "The duck" and Anden "The spirit". IIRC the pattern is something like HL for the first and HH for the second.

Comments

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Ancient Greek was also apparently tonal, although I can't think of any minimal pairs to prove it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

nómos (HH) "law" vs. nomós (LH) "prefecture; province"

As I understand it, Ancient Greek pitch-accent becomes modern Greek lexical stress.

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

But there were three diacritics in the older stages of Greek: acute, grave, and circumflex. Apparently each of these represented a different tonal (pitch?) pattern. I was more wondering whether there existed two words that differed only by different diacritics in the same position, which would prove the existence of a true tonal (and not merely a pitch) system.

That said, you're right, the pitch accent did develop into lexical stress; modern Greek uses only the acute diacritic.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I don't know if Modern Greek orthography is a guide to Ancient Greek pronunciation, but there you have πως with acute/grave (depending on whether it's followed by end of sentence or an unstressed clitic [acute] or not [grave]) meaning "that" (a conjunction) and πως with circumflex meaning "how" (an interrogative). Similarly, που with acute/grave ("that", roughly) is differentiated from που with circumflex ("where").

I think it's even less likely to reflect Ancient Greek practice that γιατι μα να για are spelled either with acute or with grave depending on the meaning within a sentence; my grammar talks about what seems to be "reasons concerned with ease of reading", and I'm not sure whether the alternate meaning of each word even existed in Ancient Greek.

(These differences are now academic in Modern Greek, which only has one stress mark anyway and, in general, does not put it on monosyllabic words.)

[pne.livejournal.com]

(These differences are now academic in Modern Greek, which only has one stress mark anyway and, in general, does not put it on monosyllabic words.)

Though perhaps interestingly enough, two cases where a stress mark is obligatorily placed on a monosyllabic words is the interrogative που πως (which used to take circumflex) to distinguish them from the conjunctive (which used to take acute/grave and now take no accent mark).

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

Here we go, I found one:

galēn' horō "I see calm waters"
galên horō "I see a weasel"

(from Aristophanes' Frogs, where he was poking fun at an actor's attempt at putting too much emotion into a word)

In both cases, stress is LH on the first word. Nevertheless, apparently tone in ancient Greek rarely produced significant oppositions like this.

It seems Punjabi is a true tone language as well.