Re: [tied] Re: Tonal IE languages

I discuss the difference in the following on-line article:

http://www.geocities.com/caraculiambro/Caraculiambro/Stress.html

In popular usage any pitch contrast may be called "tone", but linguists reserve the term for contastive pitch functioning in a special way, independently of stress or accent.

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas Nordengen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2000 1:16 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Tonal IE languages

--- In cybalist@egroups.com, "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@......> wrote: > 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 How would you define a tonal language? Norwegian and Swedish has hundreds of word pairs solely distinguished by tone.