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Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China

From:BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
Date:Saturday, December 9, 2000, 15:45
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^)> -- mailto:bp.nospam@netg.se (delete .nospam) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "If a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, of what language, pray, is Basque a dialect?" (R.A.B.)