Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Travis B.]

How is pitch accent indicated in IPA?

IIRC, for Swedish people use either acute/grave accent on the stressed syllable, or they precede the word with ¹/². For Japanese people often use the downstep symbol after the accented syllable. There are many alternative ways.

For Swedish I have also seen the caron/circumflex used for this purpose, on the wiki at least.

[Ephraim]

How is pitch accent indicated in IPA?

IIRC, for Swedish people use either acute/grave accent on the stressed syllable, or they precede the word with ¹/². For Japanese people often use the downstep symbol after the accented syllable. There are many alternative ways.

For Swedish I have also seen the caron/circumflex used for this purpose, on the wiki at least.

Right, the English language Wikipedia article on Swedish phonology seems to use a caron for accent 1 (aka acute accent) and circumflex for accent 2 (grave accent) in in phonological transcription, while attempting to use the IPA tone marks for a narrow phonetic transcription. For example:
Acute accent: /ˈǎnden/ (realized [ˈa᷇ndɛ̀n] = [ˈan˥˧dɛn˩]) 'the duck' (from and 'duck')
Grave accent: /ˈânden/ (realized [ˈa᷆ndɛ̂n] = [ˈan˧˩dɛn˥˩]) 'the spirit' (from ande 'spirit')
Grave-accent trisyllable: flickorna /ˈflɪ̂kʊɳa/ (realized [ˈflɪ᷆kːʊ᷇ɳà] = [ˈflɪ˧˩kːʊ˥˧ɳa˩]) 'the girls'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_p ... _and_pitch

The Swedish language Wikipedia article on the Swedish language uses the acute and grave accent (which matches what the accents are frequently called):
ande-n ['àndən]
and-en ['ándən]
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svenska#Prosodi

The English language Wiktionary apparently apparently uses a secondary stress mark on the following syllable to indicate accent 2:
Accent 1: /ˈ/ e.g. /ˈandɛn/ for anden as nominative definite singular of and (“duck”)
Accent 2: /ˈˌ/ e.g. /ˈanˌdɛn/ for anden as nominative definite singular of ande (“spirit”)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix ... nunciation

In either case, the examples above are essentially ad hoc transcriptions that don't really match the canonical use of the tone marks within the IPA (with the exception of the narrow transcription on the English Wikipedia). This might possibly be confusing for people who are familiar with the IPA but not with Swedish phonology.

In my experience, more in-depth treatments of Swedish phonology tend not to try and use the IPA to mark the accent distinctions, but often use a multi-tear representation with a tone curve and/or some sort of schematic representation with H, L and other symbols.

[Ephraim]

Did Proto Norse keep the strong initial stres of Proto Germanic?

AFAIK, yes.

Was it the reason behind phonological changes between Proto Norse and Old Norse?

What is the difference between strong initial stress and regular initial stress? Is it just that with a 'strong' stress, the stressed syllable is significantly more loud or forcefully pronounced in some way, and in that case, how would we be able to know that Proto-Germanic or Proto-Norse had a strong stress? Or does 'strong' stress mean that there is a high differentiation between stressed and unstressed syllables? In that case, it may be difficult to say anything about the the direction of causality.

The shift between Proto-Norse and Old-Norse is characterized by an increased differentiation between stressed and unstressed syllables. This included the loss of both quality and quantity distinctions among unstressed vowels, with only short vowels of three or possibly four qualities allowed if the syllable was completely unstressed. Many of the unstressed vowels of Proto-Norse were simply lost. On the other hand, the amount of qualities available to stressed vowels increased (at least phonologically).

Now, did the differentiation between stressed and unstressed syllables increase because of the strong stress, or did the stress become stronger because sound changes increased the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables?

[Otto Kretschmer]

AFAIK, yes.

Was it the reason behind phonological changes between Proto Norse and Old Norse?

What is the difference between strong initial stress and regular initial stress? Is it just that with a 'strong' stress, the stressed syllable is significantly more loud or forcefully pronounced in some way, and in that case, how would we be able to know that Proto-Germanic or Proto-Norse had a strong stress? Or does 'strong' stress mean that there is a high differentiation between stressed and unstressed syllables? In that case, it may be difficult to say anything about the the direction of causality.

The shift between Proto-Norse and Old-Norse is characterized by an increased differentiation between stressed and unstressed syllables. This included the loss of both quality and quantity distinctions among unstressed vowels, with only short vowels of three or possibly four qualities allowed if the syllable was completely unstressed. Many of the unstressed vowels of Proto-Norse were simply lost. On the other hand, the amount of qualities available to stressed vowels increased (at least phonologically).

Now, did the differentiation between stressed and unstressed syllables increase because of the strong stress, or did the stress become stronger because sound changes increased the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables?

Likely the first one or at least that is the position held by most scholars - strong stress caused unstressed syllabes to weaken.

IIRC Finnish also has initial stress but it is very light and does not cause weakening of unstressed syllables

[Otto Kretschmer]

For the notation - would it be something like [káisar] or [kái.sar]?

[Kuchigakatai]

A nice example of univerbation: French le lendemain 'the day after, the following day', generally used with the article le. From earlier l'endemain, with the article l', "the" tomorrow. From earlier en demain, lit. "in" tomorrow. From Late Latin dē + māne, lit. "from" tomorrow.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Did PIE have sister languages that left no descendants?

[Raholeun]

Did PIE have sister languages that left no descendants?

How would we know?

[MacAnDàil]

Perhaps they had historical descendants but not modern-day descendants?

[Ares Land]

I've seen claims that Etruscan is a distant relative of PIE. The basic idea is that Etruscan would descend from a sister language of PIE. (I'm grossly oversimplifying here!)
I don't know how serious this idea is. Probably not very. As far as I can see there's very little evidence.

[WeepingElf]

Indeed, there is very little evidence for a relationship between Etruscan and IE, and what little evidence there is, can also be taken as evidence for a relationship between Etruscan and Kartvelian instead. For the closest known relative of IE, Uralic is IMHO a much better, indeed the best, candidate. Yet, there are so few cognate that no regular sound correspondences can be reconstructed (the many Uralic words that look like cognates of IE words appear to be loanwords from IE into Uralic, as they faithfully reflect IE ablaut grades and even vowel-colouring effects of PIE laryngeals, both of which are surely Post-Indo-Uralic innovations of PIE).

[linguistcat]

Does vowel breaking occur in tonal or tone accent languages? I mostly know Japanese and am dipping my toes into Mandarin, but it seems at least Japanese tends more in the opposite direction with diphthongs becoming long monophthongs at various points in time. Most of what I have found about vowel breaking has been about Romance or Germanic languages.

[Creyeditor]

If by vowel breaking you mean diphthongization, I am pretty sure it happened in some Bantu language.

[linguistcat]

If by vowel breaking you mean diphthongization, I am pretty sure it happened in some Bantu language.

Ah cool! I'll look into that! Thank you.

[Kuchigakatai]

Does vowel breaking occur in tonal or tone accent languages? I mostly know Japanese and am dipping my toes into Mandarin, but it seems at least Japanese tends more in the opposite direction with diphthongs becoming long monophthongs at various points in time. Most of what I have found about vowel breaking has been about Romance or Germanic languages.

Some vowel breaking happened from Middle Chinese to Mandarin, e.g. 天 tʰen > tiān [tʰjɛn].

[linguistcat]

Does vowel breaking occur in tonal or tone accent languages? I mostly know Japanese and am dipping my toes into Mandarin, but it seems at least Japanese tends more in the opposite direction with diphthongs becoming long monophthongs at various points in time. Most of what I have found about vowel breaking has been about Romance or Germanic languages.

Some vowel breaking happened from Middle Chinese to Mandarin, e.g. 天 tʰen > tiān [tʰjɛn].

Perfect. Thank you for this other example closer to my area of expertise. I'll still look into the Bantu examples I found.

[fusijui]

Did PIE have sister languages that left no descendants?

How would we know?

Well, if they fell in a beech forest, yes...

[Otto Kretschmer]

When is Proto Sami dated and did it have an earlier common stage with Finnic languages?

[Otto Kretschmer]

Any ideas what potential Proto-Balto-Slavic names might sound like? They were certainly made of two parts like names in other IE language. Do you think traditional Slavic names like Vladimir, Yaroslav, Boleslav, Dobromir etc etc might date back to PBS times at least in some cases?

[Moose-tache]

Medieval Lithuanian names often consist of two elements, but I'm not aware of any specific combination that is common in both early Slavic and early Baltic.