Re: Stress placement systems

Philip Newton wrote:
> On 9/19/06, Sanghyeon Seo <sanxiyn@...> wrote:
>
>> http://www.cf.ac.uk/psych/ssd/index.html
>>
>> It introduces a systematic way to describe stress systems.
>
>
> Oooh, shiny.
In places, maybe.

I notice it says of Latin: "23/3  2 if heavy, else 3 if heavy, else 3"
(The context makes it clear that 2 and 3 mean next to last and third
from last respectively (penultimate & antepenultimate).
Now maybe I'm getting senile, but can anyone explain how this is
different from: '2 if heavy, else 3'?

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.
2. It is clear that ancient Greek words had *pitch* accent. The pitch was:
  (a) *not* dependent upon syllable quantity, but *solely on vowel length*
  (a) high pitch could occur on any one of the vowels in the last
*three* syllables, according to certain rules.
3. The modern Greek stress accent occurs (with very few exceptions) on
the same syllable as the ancient Attic & Koine pitch accent(1). This is
a strong indication IMHO that there was no separate word stress to
interfere with the process whereby pitch gave way to stress.

(1) In fact even for ancient Greek we know the pitch accent for only the
Attic, Epic and Aeolic (conventionally, other dialects are usually
printed according to the Attic system). The Koine Greek of the
Hellenistic period used the same pitch accent as Attic Greek.

There is a further cryptic sentence added to the description of ancient
Greek, namely: "Pitch accent interacts with tones". I do not know what
the writer means; Greek did not have a tonal system like Mandarin,
Cantonese, Vietnamese etc. Nor do I understand how it is supposed to be
related to the question of stress.

I'm afraid the Greek entry makes me take the whole thing with a pinch of
salt. Certainly, I think anyone using the database would be well advised
to cross check for the languages they are interested in.

BTW the entry for Welsh is correct  :)

--
Ray
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http://www.carolandray.plus.com
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Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB}

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