Syllables, intonations and Auslautgesetze

MIGUEL CARRASQUER VIDAL

Syllables and intonations In Greek, long vowels and diphthongs can have acute (rising) or circumflex (falling) intonation. The distinction directly reflects pre-Greek differences in intonation only in oxytone forms, due to the working of a set of accentological laws (the “law of limitation” and the “σωτῆρα”-rule) that make the choice between acute and circumflex automatic in non-final syllables. In Lithuanian, long vowels and diphthongs can also be acute or circumflex, although the acute has become a falling intonation, and the circumflex a rising one. Latvian has a falling intonation (`) corresponding to the Lithuanian circumflex, and two intonations (˜ and ^) corresponding to the Lithuanian acute: the “Dehnton” (˜) implies an originally stressed acute, the “Stoßton” or “broken (glottalized) tone” (^) an originally pretonic acute. In Old Prussian, the distinction is reflected orthographically on diphthongs only (falling/circumflex āi vs. rising/acute aī). In Slavic, the distinction has been neutralized in mobile paradigms (Meillet’s law), but is preserved in original barytones: acute stems remain barytone (a.p. a), while in circumflex (or short) root syllables the stress shifts forward by Dybo’s law (a.p. b). Finally, the Germanic Auslautgesetze also show a distinction in the reflexes of final acute vs. circumflex vowels and diphthongs. Given the above facts, it stands to reason to assign the distinction between rising and falling intonation on long vowels and diphthongs to Proto- Indo-European, or at least to the PIE dialect ancestral to Greek, Balto-Slavic and Germanic. However, a number of problems still remain. (1) the Greek and Balto-Slavic intonations do not always agree; (2) there is controversy over the Balto-Slavic reflexes of certain sequences (e.g. the reflexes of long grade vowels vs. vowels lengthened by a laryngeal); (3) even if the Greek, Balto-Slavic and Germanic intonations are etymologically connected, it does not follow that a separate feature (e.g. “+/- rising intonation”) needs to be set up for the IE proto-language.

20 MIGUEL CARRASQUER VIDAL

On this last point specifically, I will try to show in the following that no such feature was present in the proto-language, and that the intonations as reflected in Greek, Balto-Slavic and Germanic follow automatically from the segmental make-up of the syllable coda.

Intrinsic intonation of the segments (V, C, R, H) The relevant classes of segments are short vowels (V), long vowels (Vޢ), glides (R), laryngeals (H) and “ordinary” consonants (C). The basic rules are: 1. A short vowel (or a syllabic resonant or laryngeal1) in isolation is neither acute nor circumflex (rising and falling tone only occur when there are at least two moras). 2. A glide (i.e. m, n, l, r, u˜, $) in the syllable coda causes falling tone. 3. A laryngeal (h1, h2, h3) in the syllable coda causes rising tone. 4. Consonants other than resonants and laryngeals have no effect on the intonation. 5. Two consecutive vowels (VV, possibly from original VHV) are disyllabic, but when they eventually get contracted to become a long vowel, the second vowel behaves as a glide (i.e. it causes falling intonation). This is traditionally notated as Vࠈ. 6. A long grade vowel (Vޢ) has rising intonation.

Intonation of syllables What this means in practice is that the intonation of the vowel is not always the same as the intonation of the syllable. We can distinguish the following cases:

Syllable V vowel: short syllable: short The most trivial case.

1 In Balto-Slavic, this applies to i and u, but the other syllabic resonants become diphthongs

(iR/uR), and behave accordingly. Syllabic laryngeals (31, 32, 33) in isolation disappear in Balto-Slavic.