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

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but the article says:
"In a pitch-accented language, there is an accented syllable or mora, the position of which determines the tonal pattern of the whole word (the pitch of each syllable or mora, usually high vs. low) according to some rules."

I read this to mean that once you know which syllable is stressed, the tones of all syllables are fixed according to some rules, i.e. that there cannot be words that differ in tone but not in stress, which would be what I wrote before.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Accent is not the same thing as stress! The two terms tend to be used synonomously in stress-timed languages like English, but that is only because in these languages the two elements coincide. Stressed syllables in English are pronounced on a higher pitch than other syllables (in addition to being louder, longer, and not subject to vowel reduction).

In pitch-accent languages, however, word stress and word accent can fall on completely different syllables. In the Swedish example, both words have first-syllable stress (the default in Germanic language) and are only distinguished by accentual pattern. In Korean, stress tends to fall on a syllable beginning with an emphatic or aspirated consonant, which may or may not be identical to the syllable that bears the accent. In many pitch-accent languages, stress is more-or-less evenly distributed. This is how Japanese is usually described (although I've definitely heard examples where one syllable bears considerably more stress than the other).

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

Ah, this makes sense. Thanks for the info. :)