Message
> As Lockwood only mentions
intonation differences in _stressed_
> syllables, and Classical Greek only
(contrastively) distinguished
> intonation in stressed syllables with long
nuclei, I assumed that the
> same applied to
Lithuanian.
This is true as
to the Standard Lithuanian of today, but, eg., many High Lithuanian
dialects have pitch accent on every (or at least more than one) long syllable in
some cases (if I have time, I'll try to upload some of the .wav examples,
including ones with so called _broken tone_ (lauz^tine: priegaide:, absent from
Standard Lithuanian), with larynx being nearly closed in the middle -- thus
"breaking" effect -- which could be treated as a direct reflex of a
laryngeal by some New Agy minds). Lithuanian phonologists emphasize that only
one accent is really phonological while others are merely phonetical, but,
anyway, this could reflect an earlier state of affairs.
> Now that
Sergei is recovering - let's hope he is - I am intrigued by
>
Kazlauskas's remark 'at the time when tonal
stress ["melodinis
> kirtis" -- ST] still existed',
which implies (to me, at least) that
>
the "melodinis kirtis" no longer
exists. So what was it?
I'm intrigued as well. Probably he means
it was tone language's _tone_ vs. _pitch accent_ of today (Piotr could
probably clarify the difference, as he's a professional phonologist).
Suffice to say, that in contemporary Standard Lithuanian it's not --
probably even mostly not -- the main frequency, but rather the loudness and (as
to the diphthongs and VR-type diphthongoids) vowel quality/quantity that makes
the difference, while in tone language it's mere tone indeed (if I'm not
mistaken). There are also structural differences: in a tone language, a toneme
is something inherent to a syllable, while a pitch accent is a prosodical
option. Dybo suggests late PIE was a tone language.
Sergei