Re: Perhaps a new topic of discussion

At 11:34 pm -0400 11/5/01, Muke Tever wrote:
>From: "B E Walker" <umwalk05@...>
>> -sdeete has phonemic vowel length. would it be reasonable/naturalistic to
>> have only long vowels carry high tone? i find this concept intrinsically
>> pleasing for some absurd reason, but i don't know if there's any natlang
>> precedent for it.
>
>Well... for that particularly, I don't know.
>
>But if only because long vowels _are_ long, it's possible for them to have
>more
>options:
Yep.

>in Ancient Greek for example (when it had pitch accent), any vowel
>could have high (acute) or low (grave, the default) pitch, but a long
>could also
>have rising-falling (circumflex).  (Is that right?  Or is circumflex just
>falling?  Or am I off entirely?)
No more off than anyone else.  We simply do not know the details of ancient
Greek pitch accent other than the acute denoted high pitch and grave low,
as you say.  The ancient Greeks and Romans were poor linguists, and such
description as they give are far from clear.

The old Hindu grammarians were streets ahead and W.S. Allen argues, with
some justification IMO, that the ancient Greek pitch accent was similar to
that of Sanskrit which is rather better described.  But we cannot be sure.

The general opinion AFAIK regarding long vowels is that acute denoted low
tone onset rising to the high tone (i.e. grave + accute), whereas the
circumflex was high tone onset falling to low (accute + grave, which was
the origin of the symbol ^ ).

But, in all honesty, your guess is probably as good as mine.  Unless
time-travel is possible, I guess we'll never know the details.

Ray.

=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
=========================================