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

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

I have actually seen people claim that Swedish is a Chinese dialect -- jokingly, of course, but apparently with reasonably good cause. There are (so they say) more features than mere tonality that they have in common. I wish I had linkage to offer.

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

I believe Norwegian is, too.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I've heard "accent 1" and "accent 2" and, yes, they only apply to bisyllabic words. The actual realisations are many and varied according to dialect. Some linguists reconstruct a similar tonal system for Danish as well with the surface realisation being the distinctly unpleasant-sounding stød.

Although these are technically tonal system, I avoid that term since I find it misleading. There are a lot of differences between a system of lexical tone, as one finds in Chinese or Thai, and the pitch-accent of Scandinavian of South Slavic varieties. Other languages with pitch-accent are Japanese (again, the actual realisations vary tremendously from dialect to dialect) and Korean (although in the standard language it's been replaced with vowel length).

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

"pitch-accent"

I'd understand "pitch accent" to refer to stress, but I think those languages, like Swedish, do not (only?) have pitch accent, i.e. if I'm not mistaken, there are words that only differ in their tones but not in their stress (perhaps "anden" is an example of this).

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

Wow, they're fun words to get mixed up if you're reading :)

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

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

Swedish == Chinese

[pne.livejournal.com]

I wish I had linkage to offer.

So do I; I'd be interested in the claims they put forwards.

[pne.livejournal.com]

"I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Duck... er, wait..."

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

hehe

along the lines of what I was thinking ;)

[edricson.livejournal.com]

They're called akut and gravis respectively. Akut is a sharp dropon the stressed syllable, while gravis is a rise on the stressed syllable with a drop on the one immediately following.

However, it generally fully realised only on words which bears phrasal stress, and these are few and far between -- in fact form my impression it seems that the only ones which _obligatorily_ bear this stress are words at the ned of a clause, verb particles and prepositions governing finite clauses.

Re: Swedish == Chinese

[edricson.livejournal.com]

I think that was one of the Essentialist Explanations.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

This simply means you don't understand how the term "pitch-accent" is used in linguistics. There's an introductory article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent) with links to descriptions of the Japanese pitch-accent system.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

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

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

[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. :)

[jordik.livejournal.com]

My favourite tonal Indeurop language is Limburgish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburgish_language).

[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.

[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.

[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).