PIE accent
A lot of uncertainty remains around the accent system of PIE, but the evidence suggests a complex system.1
- Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek suggest a high pitch for the accented syllable.
- All daughters eventually switched to prominence (stress).
- Many lost the PIE system entirely.
Principles
- Any syllable could be accented.
- Stems and endings can have underlying accent, and the leftmost accent surfaces.
Classes
Fixed accent (i.e. occurring on the same syllable in all forms) occurred in →
- All thematic nominals
- Most thematic verb stems
- A minority of non-thematic verb roots
Alternating accent occurred for other lexemes. In general one group had a left accent and the other had a right. In nominals the left accent surfaced for ==the nominative and accusative (the PIE strong cases minus the vocative)^[The vocative typically had its accent deleted, but sentence initially it was the leftmost syllable by default, which may reflect a deeper connection between accent and ablaut.], while for verbs this was the singular active indicative==; so overall a similar group to those which Ablaut to the *o-grade.
Lexemes (as well as morphemes) with alternating accent can broadly be classified as
- hysterokinetic ::: shifting accent between the suffix (strong) and the ending (weak)
- proterokinetic ::: shifting accent rightward (weak)
So-called ==clitics (particles, pronouns, &c.)== never bore accent. Also see accent deletion below.
Deletion
At the sentential level major words could be de-accented. This is a striking feature since it must have occurred towards the end of the phonological realm of the language.
All accents surfaced in subordinate clauses, but in main clauses the following were de-accented unless in a phase-initial position
- Vocatives
- Finite verb forms
tidy | en | SemBr | phonotactics
Footnotes
-
2017. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, p. 24 ↩