Re: Pitch

On Tue, 17 Sep 2002 Pavel Adamek <pavel.adamek@...> wrote :

>> > > Basically, instead of a rise in volume
>> > >  you have a rise in pitch..
>> >
>> > Instead of "instead", I would say that
>> > the stress and the rise in pitch go always together.
>>
>> not so in welsh english.
>> that has a noticable drop on stressed syllables
> By the drop, do you mean that
> the stressed syllable starts at lower pitch
> that  the previous syllable ended,
> or that
> the stressed syllable starts at the same pitch
> that  the previous syllable ended
> and then it is falling?
> In the second case,
> it would support the viewpoint
> that the falling is more important
> that the presence of the rising edge.
Interesting, in Welsh itself the regular (dynamic) stress in words of
two or more syllables is on the last-syllable-but-one. However the
FINAL syllable has a distinct PITCH accent. The pitch accent seems to
have often eluded grammarians probably because English, Latin etc have
nothing comparable so they didn't really know how to describe it, even
though they were intuitively aware of it. The final pitch accent
explains
why the vowels in Welsh final "unstressed" syllables keep most of their
quality distinctions, and why in Welsh verse you rhyme stressed and
unstressed finals without distinction, like rhyming say "cabin" with
"pin" or "going" with "sing" in English (maybe it works in a strong
Wenglish accent!). It also apparently simplifies some of the totally
mind-bending complexity of Welsh poetry.

Follow the links relating to poetry from
http://www.geocities.com/~dubricius/
for more information.

Presumably the penult is lowered slightly in pitch in anticipation of
the following rise, or maybe it's just a contrast effect. Interesting
that such a pattern could survive a change of language.

Keith Mylchreest

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(Kyn nag ov den skentyl pur, par dell wonn lavarav dhis)
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