> That's why I emphasized the practical side of the matter. I know in
> some dialects the varying pitch of [o:] is well possible but for some
> unknown reason the regular Lithuanian city-dweller isn't capable of
> distinguishing the pitch and voila, we have students complaining
> about accentological tasks being impossibly hard. "Underline the
> stressed syllables in text" would be an easy task to do with an
> English text but one might compile a Lithuanian text that can be
> correctly marked with accent signs only with the aid of a dictionary,
> even by an experienced philologist.
>
> Juozas Rimas

The reason is not so mysterious: the version of Lithuanian used in towns
(not that standard Lithuanian of dictionary makers) that can be
conditionally called 'common Lithuanian' have obviously (at least for me, as
I can't find any publications on the matter) neutralized acute/circumflex
opposition on the monophthongs, as well as have nearly neutralized
short-long opposition on unstressed syllables. The reason of that
neutralization, in turn, can be, although rather speculatively, explained by
general tendention to simplification of those 'common','inter-' etc versions
of language (consider substantial DIFFERENCES in pitch accent we can observe
from dialect to dialect, and the Suvalkian-based standard Lithuanian can
sometimes rather complicate the matter than help), as well as by influence
of other languages, more prominent in towns than in country-side (cf. such
putative example of Russian influence in SYNTAX like kad+infinitive).

Sergei