Well, I would need perhaps a more precise definition of what stress accent means - my understanding that it is just about intensity/amplitude may be not enough. (As for the Greek pitch accent, there are several descriptions given by ancient grammarians and modern scholars, so that should be enough for me in order to understand what it is). I have watched the Japanese video, and cannot actually make a distinction between pitch and stress accent: what I see is that they explain how various things are put in Kansai dialect as compared to standard Japanese. This reminds me of what I heard once in Japan that, if maximum precision is needed, one would need to know which Kanji character the speaker had in mind when he said something. It might sound like a joke, but the truth is that there are several Kanji characters that are pronounced alike, which might have very different meanings (within the same dialect).
What I tried with my example of English text marked with Greek accents was to suggest that tonal accent that differentiates one word from another do apply to modern languages. Or, viceversa: the way we use tonal accent in English (or other modern languages), may very well be applied to Ancient Greek; we would thus get an Ancient Greek which is very close to what is widely perceived as a real spoken language.
I think you probably do have a point in that when people try to vary stress, they also tend to vary pitch, and vice versa, and neither speakers nor listeners really know that that’s happening at any conscious level. Listening to my recordings, I’m confident that one emphasizes pitch more, and the other emphasizes stress more, but I found it impossible to do the stress without any correlated pitch variations. I think in order to do that, I would have had to shift into a singing mode where I was intoning a single note.
I wonder what is that which differentiates the speech mode from the music mode so clearly? In both modes sounds are used which have certain frequencies attached to them, however, we cannot sing pretending that we are acually speaking nor viceversa. My guess is that speech mode is higly chromatic, whereas music mode has a discrete nature.
I remember seeing scientific data on singers and people playing wind instruments that showed that although performers in Western traditions who used vibrato thought they were doing a pure pitch modulation, they were also doing an amplitude modulation at the same time. But that doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing, or can never be at all independent. For instance, one way to recognize when you’re being assaulted by the loathsomeness of Kenny G is that he uses a different type of vibrato that is more based on stress.
This depends probably on how each instrument is built. In the case of pan-flute (which I can play a little bit), the vibrato is typically produced by repeatedly moving the flute in lateral direction, modifying thus the position of the tube against the lips, hence the flow of air into the tube, hence the intensity, as well as modifying the obturation of the tube, hence the pitch level (downwards only). The two cannot, I believe, be separated. I would not be surprised to learn that human voice behaves somewhat similarly and that, in human speech, stress accent cannot be totally dissociated from pitch accent.
I finished reading the article you shared (thanks again for that) and Vernhes seems to say that ancient Greek is a tonal language rather than a pitch-accent language, in that with tones the voice can go up and down on one single syllable, whereas pitch is supposed to remain constant over one given syllable, as far as I understood.
Actually, it is exactly what Vernhes says here that I have also understood.
I like this statement of his, regarding the grave accent:
Le grave, le βαρὺς τόνος peut aussi être non pas une position basse du ton, mais un mouvement de descente tonale: “The grave, the βαρὺς τόνος, may also be not a low position of the tone, but a movement of tonal descent.”
I also like this:
C’est pourquoi son signe a aussi son mouvement vers le bas. “This is why its sign has also its movement downwards.”
I like it especially because I also had tended to think that the signs used to mark the accents should not be merely conventional symbols, as if selected from among a limited set of characters of a typewriter or Unicode; those who invented Greek accents had all the freedom, I believe, to design the signs however they wanted. When I made the graphic representation of accents, I had the idea that the acute resembles the launching of an arrow or spear, and the grave is like hammering down the word.
I have watched the Japanese video, and cannot actually make a distinction between pitch and stress accent
I would say that it is obvious enough once your ear is ready to hear the difference. Many of the the dialect words they are comparing differ only in ending, but the guy on the left doesn’t do the intonation of standard Japanese in anything he says. There is nothing special about Japanese though: it is simply one example out of many languages to demonstrate the very thing you are trying to reconstruct.
I would not be surprised to learn that human voice behaves somewhat similarly and that, in human speech, stress accent cannot be totally dissociated from pitch accent.
This would not surprise me either. And it is striking that metrical phenomenon in the Greek meter, such as Porson’s Bridge or the caesurae, which seem extremely sensitive to the stress differences between word-initial and word-final syllables, are so bizarrely not even a little affected by those squiggly marks that the Greeks of later centuries wrote over their words, and the grammarians of later centuries described. (This is beyond the grosser point that Dionysius Halicarnassus makes with Euripides, that the words are spoke by verse accent, not lexical accent.)
Vernhes seems to say that ancient Greek is a tonal language rather than a pitch-accent language, in that with tones the voice can go up and down on one single syllable, whereas pitch is supposed to remain constant over one given syllable, as far as I understood.
There is a single rise and a single fall (at most) in a Greek word. This seems, according to the grammarians [1] and the graphical representation, to coincide with vowel junction, and in the case of long vowels, can be mid-vowel (ie. a circumflex). Pitch accent languages behave like this. Tonal languages generally distinguish different phonemes by tones (Mandarin and Cantonese do anyway), and the Greek accent seems to have no phoneme significance (ie., you can write down the words without accent and not be confused as you would from missing letters).
[1 Dionysius Thrax] οὐ μὴν ἅπασα λέξις ἡ καθ’ ἓν μόριον λόγου ταττομένη ἐπὶ τῆς αὐτῆς λέγεται τάσεως, ἀλλ’ ἣ μὲν ἐπὶ τῆς ὀξείας, ἣ δ’ ἐπὶ τῆς βαρείας, ἣ δ’ ἐπ’ ἀμφοῖν. τῶν δὲ ἀμφοτέρας τὰς τάσεις ἐχουσῶν αἳ μὲν κατὰ μίαν συλλαβὴν συνεφθαρμένον ἔχουσι τῷ ὀξεῖ τὸ βαρύ, ἃς δὴ περισπωμένας καλοῦμεν· αἳ δὲ ἐν ἑτέρᾳ τε καὶ ἑτέρᾳ χωρὶς ἑκάτερον ἐφ’ ἑαυτοῦ τὴν οἰκείαν φυλάττον φύσιν. καὶ ταῖς μὲν δισυλλάβοις οὐδὲν τὸ διὰ μέσου χωρίον βαρύτητός τε καὶ ὀξύτητος· ταῖς δὲ πολυσυλλάβοις, ἡλίκαι ποτ’ ἂν ὦσιν, ἡ τὸν ὀξὺν τόνον ἔχουσα μία ἐν πολλαῖς ταῖς ἄλλαις βαρείαις ἔνεστιν.
Apparently there are some possibilities for confusion because of elided letters:
Les anciens Grecs étaient très sensibles à cette opposition des intonations. Cela peut s’illustrer agréablement par un célèbre lapsus commis par l’acteur Hégélochos en disant le vers 279 de l’Oreste d’Euripide, pièce représentée en 408 av. J.-C.
Il devait dire :
ἐκ κυμάτων γὰρ αὖθις αὖ γαλήν᾽ὁρῶ
‘Je vois de nouveau le calme renaître des flots’
Ici γαλήν᾽est pour γαληνά, pluriel neutre de γαληνός ‘calme, serein’ ; pour l’élision et l’accentuation, même système que pour δείν᾽ἄλγη pour δεινὰ ἄλγη.
Mais il a dit :
ἐκ κυμάτων γὰρ αὖθις αὖ γαλῆν ὁρῶ
‘Je vois encore une belette sortir des flots’
Nous avons ici l’accusatif singulier de ἡ γαλῆ ‘la belette’ ! Voilà ce que pouvait donner une inadvertance dans l’intonation.
But maybe this is a very rare case?
In Mandarin just about every word is like that.
The most common place in ancient Greek where graphical accent matters for meaning is in distinguishing some of the verb forms. Was this a real characteristic of the spoken language or a literary convention? Or a bit of both?
Thanks for letting me know, but to me they all sound about the same. I’m not sure what’s going on. The only difference I hear is a slightly lower volume on the two more recent ones.
Strange! At my end they sound extremely muffled and full of white noise while the rest is professional-mic quality. Maybe it’s a problem on my computer.