Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

At 18:08 2000-12-03 -0500, E-Ching Ng wrote:
>There is a small but annoying distinction between tonal and pitch-accent
>languages, I believe.  Tonal languages have a certain compulsory tone for
>every morpheme (okay, I can think of a few exceptions in Mandarin and
>Hokkien which are said to have no tone, but they're rare and in unstressed
>positions).  Pitch-accent languages use tone the way other languages use
>stress - it gets distributed by word or sentence.   Swedish, Lithuanian
>and classical Greek are definitely pitch-accent, and I suspect
>Serbo-Croatian is too.  Punjabi just might be tonal.  It's almost close
>enough to the Himalayas for that to have caught on, but that's still a
>little far off.
Swedish and S-C definitely are pitch-accent, since "tone" isn't
distinguished in monosyllables.  Panjabi is really tonal, since its tones
originated from loss of voiced aspiration (bh dh jh gh h > p t c k 0),
which could come both before and after the syllabic peak of a monosyllable.



/ B.Philip Jonsson B^)>
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