Talk:Pitch-accent language

message: This is a really interesting concept that is entirely new to me; does anyone know enough to provide some examples? — OwenBlacker 20:40, Aug 15, 2004 (UTC)
:Apart from the examples with anden, I also know about one-syll "stegen"("the steps"(plur) ) two-syll "stegen" ("the ladder") Also, the words "norrmän" and "normen" are spelled different but pronounced similar, (at least in the high-variety Stockholm dialect.) except for the pitch.
one-syll "norrmän"("norwegians" (people) ) two-syll normen "the norm/standard".
I also know about an example in norwegian: "bønner" and "bønner". One means "beans", the other "farmers", although I can't recall now which was which...
:: I'm not sure about the "norrmän" example -- the word stresses both syllables, unlike "normen", which only stresses the first. And "farmers" is "bønder", with accent 1 (and a silent "d", making the "nd" combo into a double "n" -- and thereby rendering the vowel short, just like in "bønner"... in case you were wondering).76.113.104.58 (talk) 05:43, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Examples? 

message: I will make a rough generalization based on my experience. 
The "Standard" Swedish we in Scania here most of is the Stockholmian accent. Probably because there are so many well educated Stockholmians who move down here to take jobs. 
Anyways, the Stockholmian word melody would go something like this: da-dá-di-du-dá-dí-dí-de-dé-de-di-dá-da. 
While the Scanian would go like this: Duh-dau-dau-deu-döu-deh-döu
For instance : "Döu, jau skau ente göura deatta, döu."
It has a more provocative sound, and some would say aggressive, using more of a "uh" sound.  
I would assume, from having lived 9 years in Sweden's most southern city Trelleborg, that this is most notable in the southern Scanian accents and on the country side and that the dialect "brightens" the more north you travel.
I can easily provide soundfiles of spoken dialects around here if requested. --Fred-Chess 10:21, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Scanian dialects (along with some other Southern Sweden dialects, like Småländska and some Halländska and Blekingska) is actually Danish dialects. They sound more like Swedish then the Danish spoken in Denmark, because these areas became Swedish before the Danish in Denmark went through some large changes (they also share a lot of vocabulary with Swedish). The people in these areas have been systematically brainwashed by Swedish propaganda to identify them self as Swedish, though. See also Dacke War, Scanian War and this part in the article about Skåneland. You won't find as many and fanatic Swedish nationalists anywhere else in Sweden, as you find in the "Danish" speaking regions in Sweden. Ironically, most of the extreme right parties and organisations, that is very hostile against anything non-Swedish, have their roots in these parts of the country too. Ironically, because most of the culture in the Southern parts of Sweden is very foreign to us "real Swedes" (I really hate calling myself a "real Swede", as anybody should have the right to call them-self Swedish, but not to deny anybody else that right; but it piss me of when "Danes" call them self "Swedish" and then deny other people to do the same thing). --Se mj (talk) 21:27, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Southern dialects 

message: What is the diference between a "pitch accent" and a "melodic accent"?
 --User:213.112.113.118 13:28, 4 Dec 2004 
Different function. They have the pitch variation in common, though. Melodic accent depends on grammatical rules, and may for instance accentuate in a similar way as vocal stress is used in other languages — or together with vocal stress.
What might be called the utilization of melodic accent to express differences depending on the roots of words is explained at http://www.webgraph.se/bosse.thoren/prosodi_eng.html — however, I do not agree with the author of that page when he states that there be no difference in vocal stress. That page also lacks comparisons between the different melodic accents typical for the language's high status varieties. 
--Johan Magnus 16:09, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a revival of this discussion over at Talk:Melodic accent#Pitch/Melodic that would benefit from contributions from anyone with an interest in this question. / Alarm 16:58, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've now written a draft for a new version of Pitch accent at User:Alarm/Pitch accent. My intention is that this should replace the current article, incorporating all the relevant facts in the current Melodic accent article. If it passes some close scrutiny and replaces the current version, I'd suggest we turn Melodic accent into a disambiguation page, with links to Accent (music), Pitch accent and perhaps Intonation and/or Non-native pronunciations of English#Swedish. Anyway, all feedback on the new draft is very much welcome. / Alarm 17:23, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge with melodic accent

message: What affects the pitch of an instrument?
Re the addition of Swedish and Norwegian by Wiglaf, is this really the pitch accent of PIE which has been preserved all this time, or could it be an innovation? (in the absence of sources, I think the latter is more likely). --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 13:03, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: An innovation, as in the Southern Slavic languages. kwami 18:36, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Preservation 

message: (I copy the old "melodic accent" article here, in case someone would want to write a section about Swedish and Norwegian.)
Melodic accent
Norwegian and Swedish except Finland-Swedish are among the few modern European languages which have a melodic accent, even though we presume that the Indo-European proto-language was melodically accented. Others are Lithuanian and Serbo-Croatian. 
Scandinavian languages (Norwegian and Swedish)
The way this prosody is expressed varies quite a lot between different dialects of the language, and the dichotomy exists in most varieties. It's important for differentiating words that are identically spelled, but derived from different roots.
Words with one syllable, words stressed on the end, and short words with an unstressed suffix, usually have what is refered to as acute accent or accent 1. It's only rarely marked in orthography, but then with an acute accent. Words derived from the two-syllable roots usually have an almost equal stress on both syllables. the acute accent. For example, in Swedish, and·en pronounced with accent 1 means "the duck", while ande·n with the accent 2 means "the spirit". 
and-en [ándɛn] — "the duck"
ande-n [àndɛn] — "the spirit"
In southern Swedish dialects accent 1 is expressed as a falling tone of voice on the first syllable, while accent 2 is expressed as a rise and a fall of the tone on the first syllable. 
Questions are expressed by using a rising tone on the second syllable.
In most Danish dialects (and some Scanian too)  this type of lexical stress has been replaced by a glottal stop (stød)  in place of an acute accent.
See also
* North Germanic languages
* On the issue of tonal accent distinctions, see:
** pitch accent
** tonal language
Category:Phonology
惑乱 分からん 13:13, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Old "Melodic accent" article

message: Isn't the 2nd introductory paragraph misleading? The examples given seem to demonstrate a stress-accent rather then a pitch-accent language: "The pitch-accent language, on the other hand, only has two possibilities: accented on the first syllable, [ába], or on the second, [abá]".
At least for Serbian/Croatian (and as far as I know similarly for Scandinavian), the distinction is actually that you can have two qualitatively different accents (usually described as "falling" and "rising" for S/C and as I and II for Scandinavian) on the first syllable, with no distinctions on the unaccented syllable. Know it is true, at least for Serbian/Croatian, that the system resulted from a previous pretty much as described here, but the present situation is rather "ába" and "àba".213.47.123.225 14:07, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I need to overhaul this. But a bit of research first, as I'm somewhat rusty. Pitch accent is a different setup than a stress language like English, which after all also uses pitch. There can be two or three distinct tones, in some langs, but only one per word, or a word may or may not have an accent, which isn't the case for stress languages (at least not for lexical categories), where every word has an accent. kwami 23:20, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Not a great improvement, but a start. I have a question too: does anyone actually say English has pitch accent because of the role of prosody? Should that comment be deleted? kwami 17:21, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Misleading introduction? 

message: What about the grave accent? Does that not count as a stressed syllable?--86.179.208.101 (talk) 17:23, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Ancient_Greek_phonology#Accent. kwami (talk) 01:42, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Ancient Greek has two types of accent (acute vs. circumflex) on stressed syllables." 

message: Wikipedia articles for Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian sadly use symbols which are not international. Diacritics as on ǎ, ê, ȕ are taken from the local tradition. Incredibly, they are even labelled in these artcicles as IPA. But they have never been part of IPA, they are inconsistent, non-iconic, and unintelligible to phoneticians who haven't learnt these languages and haven't dealt with local studies in South-Slavic linguistics. Even on a phonemic/tonemic level, they make no sense. Viktor Laszlo (talk) 21:28, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  NON-IPA symbols for Serbo-Croatian pitch accent 

message: "Är det tomten på tomten?" is a very strange (possibly Swenglish) sentence. It could mean "Is THAT(!) Santa out in the yard?", "Is it the Santa (a statue) out in the yard?", or "In the yard, is it the Santa?", depending how you say it. Should probably be "Är tomten på tomten?", which could mean "Is that Santa out in the yard?", "Is the gnome out in the yard?", "Is the gardening gnome (statue) out in the yard", or "Is the yard on the estate?", depending on how you say it. (Both sentences can have other meanings too, but these are the ones that make sense to me). I can't explain how you say these sentences to get these different meanings (and in some Swedish dialects (e.g. Stockholmska), you can't); I'm Swedish, it comes natural to me.
I read "Banan på banan", first as "The curvature of the banana" and, since that seem unnatural to say, my brain then corrected it as "The curvature of the course/trajectory". That it could mean "Banana on the track", never even occurred to me. Although correct, the sentence is bad/confusing Swedish and I think it is a possible case of Swenglish. A more likely Swedish sentence would be "En banan på banan" ("A banana on the track") or "Bananer på banan" ("Bananas on the track").
Of course, it would be easier if the sentences where within a context. I think they prove that Swedish was never meant to be written with the Latin alphabet ;-)
--Se mj (talk) 22:26, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: When Old Norse was written in the younger futhark, it would actually have been even more cnfusing. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:11, 12 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad Swedish? 

message: We really could use some soundfiles on this page, especially of minimal pairs or sets of words distinguished by different pitch accents. Are there users who speak Latvian or Lithuanian, Bosnian, Croation, Serbian, Montenegrin, or Slovenian, Japanese, Wu Chinese, or other languages who could record some examples? — Eru·tuon 21:58, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sound files 

message: The paragraph headed "Description" which starts the article is unsatisfactory. What is needed here are some definitions from academic publications and perhaps some mention of the controversy which surrounds this subject. Instead we have a lot of irrelevant information which belongs later in the article, such as "The Indic system was lost by the time of the Prākrits" and so on. The paragraph needs deleting. Kanjuzi (talk) 06:45, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Description" 

message: I suggest the article should be renamed "Pitch-accent languages", since that is what it is about. It would also help to differentiate the subject of this article from Pitch accent (intonation). Kanjuzi (talk) 05:55, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article title