Phonological changes in a pitch accent language

[Otto Kretschmer]

Are there any specific phonological changes that are to be expected in a pitch accent language?

In stress timed languaged a common phenmenon is a reduction of unstressed vowels and later complete dropping of unstressed syllabes with a diversification of stressed vowels. This is what happened in Germanic languages, French and to some degree Russian as well I believe.

[hwhatting]

In stress timed languaged a common phenmenon is a reduction of unstressed vowels and later complete dropping of unstressed syllabes with a diversification of stressed vowels. This is what happened in Germanic languages, French and to some degree Russian as well I believe.

In Russian, you have the reduction, but not much dropping of unstressed syllables, except for the shortening of the infinitive ending -ti to -t' when unstressed and of the shortening of the unstressed reflexive marker -s'a to -s' after vowels, plus some shortening of frequently used words, like zdrávstvuyt'e > zdrásti "hello" / generic greeting (but that latter kind of irregular shortening of frequently used words happens in languages without a strong stress accent, too).

[linguistcat]

In Japanese, the high vowels /i/ and /u/ take the high pitch less often than the other vowels, and tend to reduce in certain environments. But not when they have high pitch. I don't know which occurred first, reduction of these vowels or high pitch moving away from them if possible. I suppose depending what you wanted to do, you could go with either in a conlang.