A few words on the Swedish accents (it's
only out of sheer laziness that I refrain from marking the dentals as such; they
have not developed into alveolars since I wrote my last e-mail :)):
Most of this stuff is based on
introspection, but I haven't read anything that contradicts it.
Like all the other Germanic languages
Swedish has a stress accent, primarily on the first syllable, but unlike most
others (except Norwegian) it also has a distinctive pitch accent. There are two kinds, called acute accent/accent I and
grave accent/accent II.
Accent I is of the same kind we find in
most European languages: higher pitch and more stress (greater loudness) serve
together to make one syllable more prominent. E.g. anden [ˈandɛn]
'the (wild) duck' (def. form of and). Accent I is usually described as a
quick rise on the the first syllable (an-), and then a fall.
Accent II can be
illustrated with the word anden [˜andɛn]
'the spirit' (def. form of ande). In this case there is also a quick rise
on the first syllable followed by a fall, but we find the same pitch
pattern on the second syllable as well, the peak of which is higher than the
peak of the first syllable. Focusing on the pitch peaks only, we may say
that anden [ˈandɛn] has a
falling accent, anden [˜andɛn]
a rising one.
Words of more than two syllables:
länderna [ˈlɛndɛɳa]
'the countries' (def. form pl. of land) has accent I, basically as in English
lengthening; länderna [˜lɛndɛɳa]
'the loins' (def. form pl. of länd) has accent II, which is realized in the
following way: the first two syllables exhibit the same pattern as a
two-syllable word with accent II, and the relationship between syllables two and
three is the same as that between the two syllables in a two-syllable word with
accent I. This also applies to compounds. In a previous e-mail I mentioned
the word vedtrave [˜veːtːrɑːvɛ]
'woodpile'. You
can't that tell from a compound like this that trave 'pile' in itself has accent
II [˜trɑːvɛ],
because the pitch distinction is neutralized. A compound like tånagel [˜toːnɑːgɛl]
'toe nail' has the same kind of accent as does vedtrave, though nagel [ˈnɑːgɛl]
'nail' has accent
I.
The above description applies
mainly to words in isolation. In connected speech both accent I and accent II
has a falling accent (in terms of pitch peaks on different syllables), but in
words with accent II it's slightly delayed. In other words, accent I words
behave basically as in isolation (though the difference between the syllables is
smaller in connected speech), whereas accent II words has a lower pitch peak on
the syllable which has a higher peak in
isolation.
Urban