Pitch accent
From Freepedia
For pitch accent in music, see: accent (music).
Pitch accent is a kind of accent system employed in many languages around the world. In a pitch-accented language, there is an accented syllable or mora, the position of which determines the tonal pattern of the whole word (the pitch of each syllable or mora, usually high vs. low) according to language-specific rules.
It is hypothesized that Proto-Indo-European had a pitch accent system. Some well-known ancient Indo-European tongues to have preserved this feature are:
- Ancient Greek had a pitch accent, which later changed into a stress accent (where accented syllables are pronounced more forcefully, as in English, instead of having a higher pitch).
- Vedic Sanskrit.
In other Indo-European languages, such as Swedish, Lithuanian, and Serbo-Croatian, a new pitch accent system evolved that is unrelated to that of Proto-Indo-European.
Polysyllabic compounds in the Shanghai dialect of Wu Chinese, have characteristics of pitch accent as well.
Japanese is also considered to be a language with pitch accent. In Standard Japanese, which is based on the Tokyo dialect, a word may either unaccented or accented. This is lexical, i.e., whether or not a word is accented, and if so, where the accent lies, is an unpredictable property of a word, just as the placement of stress in English is lexical (though in both languages, there are rules which govern permissible accents). See Japanese pitch accent for more information.
See also
External link
http://www.geocities.com/caraculiambro/Caraculiambro/Stress.html
