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

[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).