Re: Stress placement systems

On Tue, 19 Sep 2006 19:34:43 +0100, R A Brown <ray@...>
wrote:

>On Classical Greek we read the primary *stress* is: "12/2R". I
>understand this to mean "on last syllable if heavy, else on next to last
>if heavy, else next to last".
>
>To put it politely, this is rubbish - because:
>1. Ancient Greek did not, as far as we know, have word stress; there
>possibly was phrasal stress, but we can merely guess how that might have
>worked.
Quite right.  In fact, I would argue that Ancient Greek lacked even
lexical pitch -- i.e. the pitch was phrasal in nature.  My main piece of
evidence for this is the use of the grave accent.  It indicates that,
where a high pitch would be pronounced in isolation, it is not pronounced
in the given phrase.  As a result, it's no surprise that the grave is
typically used for prepositions, pronouns, adjectives, and genitive
nouns.  Basically, these kinds of words tended to be treated as clitics,
at least on the prosodic level.  I think this echoes the situation of
latest PIE.

- Rob

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