Re: [tied] Tonal IE languages

Also Lithuanian, Latvian, Slovene, Serbian and Croatian have pitch accent (tonal contrasts in accented syllables). Ancient Greek had it too. Danish has no pitch accent, but its "sto/d" is a related phenomenon.

None of these languages (including Punjabi, Swedish and Norwegian) is truly tonal. Technically speaking, they are pitch-accent languages.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Dennis King

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 9:39 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Tonal IE languages

Thomas Nordengen wrote: > My language Norwegian is often referred to as a "singing" or tonal > language. Are Norwegian and Swedish the only IE tonal languages? Panjabi, which is not very different from Hindi/Urdu lexically, grammatically, phonologically, nevertheless differs from it and other North Indian languages in distinguishing words tonally. Dennis King