Proto-Indo-European accent
 | This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points. (December 2019) |
Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual (stress) system of the Proto-Indo-European language.
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 similar to modern-day Japanese, not 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 and Ancient Greek, as in the declension of athematic nouns,
- PIE *pṓds 'foot, step'
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 *wĺ̥kʷos 'wolf' > Sanskrit nom. sg. vṛ́kas, gen. sg. vṛ́kasya, nom. pl. vṛ́kās
- PIE oxytone *suHnús '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 had a predictable accent):
- PIE *bʰéromh₁nos 'carried' > Vedic bháramāṇas
- PIE *dʰoréyeti 'holds' > Vedic dhāráyati
- PIE *nemesyéti 'worships' > Vedic namasyáti
- PIE *h₁rudʰrós 'red' > Vedic rudhirás
As one can see, the placement of the reconstructed PIE accent is reflected in Vedic Sanskrit basically intact. According to the reflex 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[who?] and Pashto), Ancient Greek, Balto-Slavic and Anatolian. In Proto-Germanic, free accent was retained long enough for Verner's Law 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 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[1]).
Ancient Greek also preserves the free PIE accent in its nouns (see Ancient Greek accent), 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.
Anatolian languages show traces of the old PIE accent in the lengthening of the formerly accented syllable. Compare: