Talk:Pitch accent

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[edit] Examples?

This is a really interesting concept that is entirely new to me; does anyone know enough to provide some examples? — OwenBlacker 20:40, Aug 15, 2004 (UTC)

Apart from the examples with anden, I also know about one-syll "stegen"("the steps"(plur) ) two-syll "stegen" ("the ladder") Also, the words "norrmän" and "normen" are spelled different but pronounced similar, (at least in the high-variety Stockholm dialect.) except for the pitch.

one-syll "norrmän"("norwegians" (people) ) two-syll normen "the norm/standard". I also know about an example in norwegian: "bønner" and "bønner". One means "beans", the other "farmers", although I can't recall now which was which...

[edit] Pitch/Melodic

What is the diference between a "pitch accent" and a "melodic accent"?

Different function. They have the pitch variation in common, though. Melodic accent depends on grammatical rules, and may for instance accentuate in a similar way as vocal stress is used in other languages — or together with vocal stress.

What might be called the utilization of melodic accent to express differences depending on the roots of words is explained at http://www.webgraph.se/bosse.thoren/prosodi_eng.html — however, I do not agree with the author of that page when he states that there be no difference in vocal stress. That page also lacks comparisons between the different melodic accents typical for the language's high status varieties. (Copied from Johan Magnus' answer at the "Pitch accent" page.)

Is this term really used in any linguistic literature? Because it seems fairly rare when you Google for it and a lot of the hits are references from Wikipedia mirrors or even using us as a source [1]. The usage elsewhere seems to be about prosody in general. And there is actually a completely different definition for "melodic accent" that has to do with music, not language that seems very common. Neither, though, can be found in EB. It seems somewhat of a neologism that is only used when refering to Scandinavian languages (and only passingly about others).
Could someone cite a source for this one so we can clearly define it? Peter Isotalo 19:49, May 5, 2005 (UTC)
Almost forgot the source: Olle Engstrand, Fonetikens grunder, 2004 ("The Basics of Phonetics") page 188 (my translation):
"Since the difference between grave and accute accent is mainly about tone level, the accents are termed tonal and since they operate on a word-level, i.e. forming contrasts between otherwise identical words, they are considered to be word accents. The grave and acute accents are the tonal word accents of Swedish."
The source used by Johan Magnus [2] also describes it as a tonal accent. Peter Isotalo 20:17, May 5, 2005 (UTC)

There seem to be a confusion between two things here: "accent" as in "distinguishably different ways of realizing phonetical stress", and "accent" as in "foreign accent" or "linguistic variety". The recent additions of Fred and his comment at Talk:Swedish language about "sing-songy Scandinavian accents" leads me to believe that he is interpreting "Melodic accent" as the later. The original article, however, seems to concentrate on the former - the feature Peter in his response to Fred at Talk:Swedish language calls tonal word accent. I share his suspicion that the term "Melodic accent" used in this sense is probably a neologism, and as we've seen it also easily leads to misinterpretations. The most used English term for this phenomenon, however, actually seem to be Pitch accent. Googling gives the following results: "pitch accent" swedish OR norwegian -wikipedia 638, "melodic accent" swedish OR norwegian -wikipedia 173, and "tonal word accent" swedish OR norwegian -wikipedia 29. It could be argued that this makes no particular distinction between the rather different concept of Japanese pitch accent or the seemingly more related concepts in Serbo-Croatian (see Serbo-Croatian#Stress) and Lithuanian. (Possibly the intention of the original author was to make such a distinction. However, the differences Johan Magnus states exist between the two terms is not as clear cut as he makes them sound.) My suggestion is to merge this page into Pitch accent and cover all the different aspects of the phonological phenomenon there, or, as a less desirable alternative, renaming this page Pitch accent in Scandinavian languages. / Alarm 10:53, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

You are correct. I don't understand it, and chances are others also don't. So I agree to merge it. Neither article is very large. But we should wait for Isotalo (I will call him Isotalo as I don't consider it insulting, but a cool name, and he can get upset all he wants) who might have objections. --Fred-Chess 11:54, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
Well, there is some work to do on the subject, since there are several different articles making quite different statements on the topic. For example, I very much doubt the factual accuracy of this quote from Tone (linguistics) about tonal languages:
Some Indo-European are usually characterized as tonal, such as Lithuanian, Old Church Slavonic, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, but they are in fact pitch accent languages; Limburgian, Swedish and Norwegian may be closer to being true tone languages.
I am still reading up on the subject and hope to be able to write a new and more correct version. But I, too, would appreciate Peter's input. Meanwhile, I hope you don't mind if I revert your changes, since I think they only add to the confusion. Even the statement that Serbo-Croatic and Lithuanian are the only other European languages with a similar feature is incorrect. As the above quote hints, the Limburgish language (or rather, dialect) posesses a similar distinction, as does some dialects of Basque (See Basque language#Stress and pitch) and, it seems, Slovenian (although the usage of different terms in the text in Slovenian language#Stress, Length and Tone seems to be a good example of the confusing usage around here.) / Alarm 16:52, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
I think the linguists are fairly unanimous on the subject. I've looked it up in Engstrands Fonetikens grunder and David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (which is a great resource for general linguistic information, btw) and this is how they seem to seperate the terms:
  • Tone languages: The most well-known languages in this category are Chinese (with the exception of Shanghai dialect), Thai and Vietnamese where the tone of individual syllables changes the meaning, and where each tone is unpredictable from morphological context. Moreover a lot of the tones are glides. There are not just high, middle or low tones, but also dynamic tones, like low falling rising or high falling. The classic example of Mandarin four forms of "ma" illustrates this quite nicely. There are also langauges like Twi where change in tone means a change in tense, and there are examples like Gbe languages (thanks to Mark for brigning that to my attention) that have much simpler tone systems than Mandarin or Vietnamese.
  • Pitch accent languages: These are the languages like Swedish, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian, where individual words can change meaning depending on a certain tonal accent, but where this feature is not very prominent, or like in Swedish, where the tone is completely predictable from the morphology of a word; any native listener could understand these languages even if the foreign speaker ignored the tonal accent. For obvious reasons, this also means that only words with two or more syllables can feature the tonal accent. I don't know if I've actually read any linguists classifying, for example Swedish, as a tone language, but I've certainly read Swedish linguists firmly dismissing saying why it is not a tone language, because of the above mentioned reasons.
And then, of course, there are the languages that use stress. In some, like Finnish or Farsi, the stress is almost always on the same syllable (first and last respectively), while English and Russian aren't quite as predictable. It must be noted here that Japanese doesn't use stress at all, while Swedish combines stress with the pitch accent-features called tonal word accent.
As for melodic accent, I have to remind you that the term actually means something entirely different that has to do with accent in a musical context. This article should probably be cleared out from the linguistic meaning or perhaps just redirected to accent (music).
I must say that this among the trickiest linguistic definitions I've come across so far, what with all the terminology intertwining. Do you feel any wiser after this attempt at clarifying?
Peter Isotalo 12:00, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your interesting contributions.
Looking back in the history, Ruhrjung noted the origin of the text to be a "Nordic FAQ". Ruhrjung's link currently doesn't work, but it can be found here: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/nordic-faq/part2_NORDEN/section-1.html (search in the text for melodic accent). There seems to be no source other than "common knowledge". The term seems to have been invented by the author of the FAQ (so you were right, Peter).
I think we sometimes engage a little too much in bickering over unverifiable subjects instead of doing something useful, with this I mean add material from verifyable sources. This page seems rather irrelevant.
This page links to no other article page. As it was originally written in a Nordiq FAQ, lets incorporate interesting parts (if any) into Swedish Language and recreate this page as just a link to the musical term. And then don't argue about this any more as we have no sources.
Peter's material above is perfectly in order and might be suitable on a responding page.
--Fred-Chess 19:43, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Actually, I wouldn't call this bickering or arguing. Rather, I see it as a discussion that will ultimately lead to the improvement of Wikipedia. I agree with almost everything Peter is saying. To be constructive, I've written a draft for a new version of Pitch accent at User:Alarm/Pitch accent. My intention is that this should replace the current article, incorporating all the relevant facts in the current Melodic accent article. If it passes some close scrutiny and replaces the current version, I'd suggest we turn Melodic accent into a disambiguation page, with links to Accent (music), Pitch accent and perhaps Intonation and/or Non-native pronunciations of English#Swedish. Anyway, all feedback on the new draft is very much welcome. / Alarm 17:17, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Alarm here. I know it must seem rather pointless to have such voluminous discussions about articles that have turned out to be pretty wrong, but at least we've learned something. Some things need to take time, I guess.
I think what you've written att pitch accent looks like a very good start, Alarm. I also support redirecting this to accent (music), and I think adding comments in other articles is probably a good idea as well.
Peter Isotalo 20:42, May 23, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Southern dialects

I will make a rough generalization based on my experience.

The "Standard" Swedish we in Scania here most of is the Stockholmian accent. Probably because there are so many well educated Stockholmians who move down here to take jobs.

Anyways, the Stockholmian word melody would go something like this: da-dá-di-du-dá-dí-dí-de-dé-de-di-dá-da.

While the Scanian would go like this: Duh-dau-dau-deu-döu-deh-döu For instance : "Döu, jau skau ente göura deatta, döu." It has a more provocative sound, and some would say aggressive, using more of a "uh" sound.

I would assume, from having lived 9 years in Sweden's most southern city Trelleborg, that this is most notable in the southern Scanian accents and on the country side and that the dialect "brightens" the more north you travel.

I can easily provide soundfiles of spoken dialects around here if requested. --Fred-Chess 10:21, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Redirecting

I don't know enough about the musical aspects of melodic accent to write anything about, so I'll just redirect it to accent (music) for now.

Peter Isotalo 11:58, May 28, 2005 (UTC)

Shouldn't the article say Enlish uses pitch accent? (For example, contrast is usually marked by L+H* pitch accent.)Jirka6 03:38, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

No, it shouldn't. English is an intonation language which employs pitch contours for various syntactic and pragmatic ends, but crucially not for lexical distinctions.213.47.123.225 20:22, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I understand that "English does not use pitch accent to make lexical distinctions" but it still does not mean one cannot say "English uses pitch accent to mark various syntactic and pragmatic functions". --Jirka6 00:52, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
It says already: "In a wider sense of the term, ”pitch accent” is sometimes also used to describe intonation, such as methods of conveying surprise, changing a statement into a question, or expressing Information Structure (topic-focus, contrasting), using variations in pitch. A great number of languages use pitch in this way, including English as well as all other major European languages. They are often called intonation languages."
Is this your contribution? Anyway, I think it's very much acceptable this way, as long as the distinction between pitch accent languages and intonation languages is not obscured.213.47.123.225 13:55, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with melodic accent

What is the diference between a "pitch accent" and a "melodic accent"?

--User:213.112.113.118 13:28, 4 Dec 2004

Different function. They have the pitch variation in common, though. Melodic accent depends on grammatical rules, and may for instance accentuate in a similar way as vocal stress is used in other languages — or together with vocal stress.

What might be called the utilization of melodic accent to express differences depending on the roots of words is explained at http://www.webgraph.se/bosse.thoren/prosodi_eng.html — however, I do not agree with the author of that page when he states that there be no difference in vocal stress. That page also lacks comparisons between the different melodic accents typical for the language's high status varieties.

--Johan Magnus 16:09, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

There is a revival of this discussion over at Talk:Melodic accent#Pitch/Melodic that would benefit from contributions from anyone with an interest in this question. / Alarm 16:58, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
I've now written a draft for a new version of Pitch accent at User:Alarm/Pitch accent. My intention is that this should replace the current article, incorporating all the relevant facts in the current Melodic accent article. If it passes some close scrutiny and replaces the current version, I'd suggest we turn Melodic accent into a disambiguation page, with links to Accent (music), Pitch accent and perhaps Intonation and/or Non-native pronunciations of English#Swedish. Anyway, all feedback on the new draft is very much welcome. / Alarm 17:23, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Preservation

What affects the pitch of an instrument? Re the addition of Swedish and Norwegian by Wiglaf, is this really the pitch accent of PIE which has been preserved all this time, or could it be an innovation? (in the absence of sources, I think the latter is more likely). --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 13:03, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

An innovation, as in the Southern Slavic languages. kwami 18:36, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

You are quite correct to write that the 2 or 3 tones of modern continental Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Swedish; the presence or absence of the Stød glottalization corresponds to these tones in Danish) is unrelated to the proto-IE pitch accent. But you are entirely WRONG to apply this to the pitch accents in the western South Slavic (Serbo-Croat-Bosnian and Slovenian) and Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian) languages. Indeed, Lithuanian and the Čakavica (Adriatic coastal) dialects of Croatian are (with Homeric Greek and Vedic Sanskrit) probably the best witnesses to both the position and the character of the original proto-IE pitch accent. Unfortunately, I can't cite references from memory, but you will find an account of this in every treatment of proto-IE phonology. (preceding unsigned comment by 132.185.144.122 (talk · contribs) 08:56, 17 October 2005)

Since the Baltic and Slavic languages have the same ancestor, Proto-Balto-Slavic, would it not make sense that if the pitch accent system was preserved from PIE in LIthuanian, it was also preserved in Serbo-Croatian? Does anyone have any proof that Serbo-Croatian developed a pitch-accent system on its own rather than preserving it from PIE? Didn't Proto-Slavic have a pitch accent system? Edrigu 18:08, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Old "Melodic accent" article

(I copy the old "melodic accent" article here, in case someone would want to write a section about Swedish and Norwegian.)

Melodic accent

Norwegian and Swedish except Finland-Swedish are among the few modern European languages which have a melodic accent, even though we presume that the Indo-European proto-language was melodically accented. Others are Lithuanian and Serbo-Croatian.

Scandinavian languages (Norwegian and Swedish)

The way this prosody is expressed varies quite a lot between different dialects of the language, and the dichotomy exists in most varieties. It's important for differentiating words that are identically spelled, but derived from different roots.

Words with one syllable, words stressed on the end, and short words with an unstressed suffix, usually have what is refered to as acute accent or accent 1. It's only rarely marked in orthography, but then with an acute accent. Words derived from the two-syllable roots usually have an almost equal stress on both syllables. the acute accent. For example, in Swedish, and·en pronounced with accent 1 means "the duck", while ande·n with the accent 2 means "the spirit".

and-en [ándɛn] — "the duck" ande-n [àndɛn] — "the spirit"

Sample of Central Swedish realization of the two accents (help·info)

In southern Swedish dialects accent 1 is expressed as a falling tone of voice on the first syllable, while accent 2 is expressed as a rise and a fall of the tone on the first syllable.

Questions are expressed by using a rising tone on the second syllable.

In most Danish dialects (and some Scanian too) this type of lexical stress has been replaced by a glottal stop (stød) [støʔ] in place of an acute accent.

See also

Category:Phonology

惑乱 分からん 13:13, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Misleading introduction?

Isn't the 2nd introductory paragraph misleading? The examples given seem to demonstrate a stress-accent rather then a pitch-accent language: "The pitch-accent language, on the other hand, only has two possibilities: accented on the first syllable, [ába], or on the second, [abá]". At least for Serbian/Croatian (and as far as I know similarly for Scandinavian), the distinction is actually that you can have two qualitatively different accents (usually described as "falling" and "rising" for S/C and as I and II for Scandinavian) on the first syllable, with no distinctions on the unaccented syllable. Know it is true, at least for Serbian/Croatian, that the system resulted from a previous pretty much as described here, but the present situation is rather "ába" and "àba".213.47.123.225 14:07, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I need to overhaul this. But a bit of research first, as I'm somewhat rusty. Pitch accent is a different setup than a stress language like English, which after all also uses pitch. There can be two or three distinct tones, in some langs, but only one per word, or a word may or may not have an accent, which isn't the case for stress languages (at least not for lexical categories), where every word has an accent. kwami 23:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
Not a great improvement, but a start. I have a question too: does anyone actually say English has pitch accent because of the role of prosody? Should that comment be deleted? kwami 17:21, 9 September 2007 (UTC)