Re: Split-Ergativity Madness

David Peterson wrote:
>     On a side note, has anyone heard anything about Swedish, Japanese and
>Serbo-Croat being pitch-accent languages?
Swedish does have a kind of phonemic pitch accent. However, altho' it's easy
to construct minimal pairs (_anden_ "the spirit" with acute accent, _anden_
"the duck" with grave), it's no big deal if don't get it right. Unmusical me
will likely not notice if you get it wrong, and I laughed out loud when I
read in a school textbook that this feature means that Swedes have an easier
time than other westerners learning Chinese.

                                                          Andreas


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