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Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual (
stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
) system of the
Proto-Indo-European language Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
.


Description

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is usually reconstructed as having had variable lexical stress: the placement of the stress in a word (the accent) was not predictable by its phonological rules. Stressed syllables received a higher pitch than unstressed ones, so PIE is often said to have had
pitch accent A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...
similar to modern-day
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
, not to be confused with systems of one or two syllables per word having one of at least two unpredictable tones, the tones all others being predictable. PIE accent could be ''mobile'' so it could change place throughout the inflectional paradigm. This quality persisted in
Vedic Sanskrit Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...
and
Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
, as in the declension of
athematic In Indo-European studies, a thematic vowel or theme vowel is the vowel or from ablaut placed before the ending of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and tho ...
nouns, * PIE 'foot, step' :* PIE nom. sg. *pṓds > Sanskrit '' pā́t'', Ancient Greek :* PIE
gen. The Book of Genesis (from Greek language, Greek ; Hebrew language, Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית ''Bəreʾšīt'', "In hebeginning") is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its Hebrew name is the same as its i ...
sg. *pedés > Sanskrit ''padás'', Ancient Greek :* PIE acc. sg. * > Sanskrit ''pā́dam'', Ancient Greek , or in the conjugation of athematic verbs (compare Sanskrit root present first-person sg. ''émi'', first-person plural ''imás''). Otherwise, the accent was placed at the same syllable throughout the inflection. Nouns are divided into ''barytones'' if they are accented on the first syllable and ''oxytones'' if they are accented on the last syllable: * PIE barytone 'wolf' > Sanskrit nom. sg. '' vṛ́kas'', gen. sg. ''vṛ́kasya'', nom. pl. ''vṛ́kās'' * PIE oxytone 'son' > Sanskrit nom. sg. '' sūnús'', gen. sg. ''sūnós'', nom. pl. ''sūnávas'' PIE accent was also ''free'' so it could stand on any syllable in a word, which was faithfully reflected in the Vedic Sanskrit accent (the later
Classical Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
had a predictable accent): * PIE 'carried' > Vedic ''bháramāṇas'' * PIE 'holds' > Vedic ''dhāráyati'' * PIE 'worships' > Vedic ''namasyáti'' * PIE 'red' > Vedic ''rudhirás'' As one can see, the placement of the reconstructed PIE accent is reflected in
Vedic Sanskrit Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid- 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...
basically intact. According to the
reflex In biology, a reflex, or reflex action, is an involuntary, unplanned sequence or action and nearly instantaneous response to a stimulus. Reflexes are found with varying levels of complexity in organisms with a nervous system. A reflex occurs ...
of the PIE accent, Indo-European languages are divided into those with free accent preserved, either directly or indirectly, and those with ''fixed'' (or ''bound'') accent. Free accent is preserved in Vedic Sanskrit (of modern Indo-Iranian languages, according to some and
Pashto Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani (). Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languages ...
), Hellenic, Balto-Slavic and Anatolian. In
Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branc ...
, free accent was retained long enough for
Verner's Law Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives , , , , , following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives , , , , . The law was ...
to be dependent on it, but later, stress was shifted to the first syllable of the word.


Reflexes

The Vedic accent is generally considered the most archaic, fairly faithfully reflecting the position of the original PIE accent.
Avestan Avestan (), or historically Zend, is an umbrella term for two Old Iranian languages: Old Avestan (spoken in the 2nd millennium BCE) and Younger Avestan (spoken in the 1st millennium BCE). They are known only from their conjoined use as the scrip ...
manuscripts do not have written accent, but we know indirectly that at some period the free PIE accent was preserved (e.g. Avestan *r is devoiced yielding ''-hr-'' before voiceless stops and after the accent — if the accent was not on the preceding syllable, *r is not devoiced). Ancient Greek also preserves the free PIE accent in its nouns (see
Ancient Greek accent The Ancient Greek accent is believed to have been a melodic or pitch accent. In Ancient Greek, one of the final three syllables of each word carries an accent. Each syllable contains a vowel with one or two vocalic morae, and one mora in a word ...
), but with limitations that prevent the accent from being positioned farther than the third syllable from the end (next from the end if the last vowel was long). However, Greek is almost completely worthless for reconstructing the PIE accent in verbs, because (other than in a few cases) it is consistently positioned as close to the start as the rules allow. Proto-Germanic initially preserved the PIE free accent, with some innovations. In the last stage of Proto-Germanic, the accent was replaced by a stress accent on the first syllable of the word, but prior to that it left its traces in the operation of
Verner's law Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives , , , , , following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives , , , , . The law was ...
.
Anatolian languages The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language. ...
show traces of the old PIE accent in the lengthening of the formerly accented syllable. Compare: * PIE *dóru 'tree; wood' > Hittite, Luwian '' tāru'' * PIE *wódr̥ 'water' > Hittite '' wātar'', but PIE 'waters' (collective) > Hittite ''widār'' Some
Balto-Slavic languages The Balto-Slavic languages form a branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family of languages, traditionally comprising the Baltic languages, Baltic and Slavic languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits ...
also retain traces of the free PIE accent. For the reconstruction of the Proto-Balto-Slavic accent, the most important evidence comes from Lithuanian, from Latvian (traditionally Lithuanian is thought as more relevant, but that role is being increasingly being taken over by Latvian), and from some Slavic languages, especially Western
South Slavic languages The South Slavic languages are one of three branches of the Slavic languages. There are approximately 30 million speakers, mainly in the Balkans. These are separated geographically from speakers of the other two Slavic branches (West and East) ...
and their archaic dialects. The Balto-Slavic accent is continued in the
Proto-Slavic accent Proto-Slavic accent is the accentual system of Proto-Slavic and is closely related to the accentual system of some Baltic languages ( Lithuanian and Latvian) with whom it shares many common innovations that occurred in the Proto-Balto-Slavic period ...
. Accentual alternations in inflectional paradigms (both verbal and nominal) are also retained in Balto-Slavic. It used to be held that Balto-Slavic has an innovative accentual system, but nowadays, according to some researchers, Balto-Slavic is taking a pivotal role in the reconstruction of the PIE accent (see below). Indirect traces of the PIE accent are said to be reflected in the development of certain sounds in various branches. For the most part, however, these are of limited, if any, utility in reconstructing the PIE accent.


Unaccented words

Some PIE lexical categories could be unaccented ( clitics). These are chiefly
particles In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from su ...
(PIE 'and' > Vedic '' -ca'', Latin '' -que'', Ancient Greek '' τε'') and some forms of
pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts o ...
(PIE 'to me' > Vedic ''me''). Vedic Sanskrit evidence also indicates that the
Proto-Indo-European verb Proto-Indo-European verbs reflect a complex system of morphology, more complicated than the substantive, with verbs categorized according to their aspect, using multiple grammatical moods and voices, and being conjugated according to person, nu ...
could be unaccented in some syntactical conditions, such as in finite position in the main clause (but not sentence-initially, where verbs would bear whatever accent they would have borne in subordinate clauses). The same is true of vocatives, which would be deaccented unless they appeared sentence-initially.


Interpretation

No purely phonological rules for determining the position of PIE accent have been ascertained for now. Nevertheless, according to the traditional doctrine, the following can be said of the PIE accentual system: PIE thematic nominals and thematic verbal stems all had fixed accent (i.e. on the same syllable throughout the paradigm), which was inherited in all attested daughter languages, although there exist some uncertainties regarding the simple thematic present. Some athematic nominals and verb stems also had fixed accent (chiefly on the root), but most had alternating, mobile accent, exhibiting several characteristic patterns; in all of them the surface accent was to the left in one group of inflected forms (nominoaccusative of nominals, active singular of verbs), and to the right in the rest. These facts are often interpreted as being the result of the interplay between individual morphemes, each of which belonged, unpredictably, to one of several accentual classes in PIE. According to this view, endings and stems could all be underlyingly accented or not, the leftmost underlying accent surfaced, and the words with no underlying accent were accented by default on the leftmost syllable.


Modern theories

Traditionally the PIE accent has been reconstructed in a straightforward way, by the comparison of Vedic, Ancient Greek and Germanic; e.g. PIE 'father' from Sanskrit pitā́, Ancient Greek , Gothic '' fadar''. When the position of the accent matched in these languages, that was the accent reconstructed for "PIE proper". It was taken for granted that the Vedic accent was the most archaic and the evidence of Vedic could be used to resolve all the potentially problematic cases. It was shown, however, by
Vladislav Illich-Svitych Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych (russian: Владисла́в Ма́ркович И́ллич-Сви́тыч, also transliterated as Illič-Svityč; September 12, 1934 – August 22, 1966) was a Soviet linguist and accentologist. He was a fo ...
in 1963 that the Balto-Slavic accent does not match the presupposed PIE accent reconstructed on the basis of Vedic and Ancient Greek — the Greek-Vedic barytones correspond to Balto-Slavic '' fixed paradigms'' (or barytone, or ''1'' accent paradigm), and Greek-Vedic oxytones correspond to Balto-Slavic '' mobile paradigms'' (or ''2'' accent paradigm, with orthotonic word-forms and forms-''enclinomena'').Kapović 2008:272 Moreover, in about a quarter of all cognate Vedic and Ancient Greek etymons accents do not match at all; e.g. * PIE 'field' > Ancient Greek : Vedic '' ájras'' * PIE 'father-in-law' > Ancient Greek : Vedic '' śváśuras'' * PIE 'which' > Ancient Greek : Vedic '' katarás''


Valence theory

In 1973 (an early version of the hypothesis was presented in 1962), the Moscow accentological school, headed by linguists
Vladimir Dybo Vladimir Antonovich Dybo (russian: Влади́мир Анто́нович Дыбо́; born 30 April 1931) is a Soviet and Russian linguist, Doctor Nauk in Philological Sciences (1979), Professor (1992), Academician of the Russian Academy of Scie ...
and Sergei Nikolaev, has been reconstructing the PIE accentual system as a system of two tones or ''valences'': + (dominant) and − (recessive). Proto-Indo-European would thus not have, as is usually reconstructed, a system of free accent such as is found in Vedic, but instead every morpheme would be inherently dominant or recessive, and the position of the accent would be later determined in various ways in the various daughter languages (depending on the combinations of (+) and (−) morphemes), so that Vedic would certainly ''not'' be the most archaic language. Many correspondences among IE languages, as well as certain phenomena in individual daughters dependent on PIE tones, should corroborate this interpretation. Dybo lists several shortcomings in the traditional approach to the reconstruction of PIE accent.Cited after Kapović 2008:272 Amongst others, incorrect belief in the direct connection between the PIE accent and
ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German ''Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
, which in fact does not explain the position of PIE accent at all. Usually, for example, it is thought that zero-grade should be unaccented, but that is evidently not valid for PIE (e.g. 'wolf', 'seven' etc.) according to the traditional reconstruction. Furthermore, Dybo claims that there is no phonological, semantic or morphological reason whatsoever for the classification of certain word to a certain accentual type, i.e. the traditional model cannot explain why Vedic ' 'wolf' is barytone and Vedic '' devás'' 'deity' is oxytone. According to Dybo, such discrepancies can only be explained by presupposing lexical tone in PIE.


See also

*
Proto-Indo-European noun Proto-Indo-European nominals include nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. Their grammatical forms and meanings have been reconstructed by modern linguists, based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. This article discusses nouns a ...
(see esp. section on athematic nouns and ablaut-accentual patterns)


Notes


Bibliography

* * * * * * * Roman Sukač, ''Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and Balto-Slavic Accentology''. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. *


Further reading

* * {{Proto-Indo-European language Accent Tone (linguistics)