Ancient Greek Pitch Accent, Not Stress*

Abstract

Ancient Greek accent involves both stress and tone (Allen 1973, Steriade 1988). We present here a new piece of evidence for the details of the tonal part, based on a lowering process whereby a H tone on the final TBU of a word lowers if the word is followed by another tonic word: H...H → L...H. This is essentially what is reported for Rimi, a Tanzanian Bantu language, where HH loses the first of its H tones (Olson 1964, ‘Anti-Meeussen’s Rule’). If correct, this motivates three tonal classes in Ancient Greek: HL* in words like basiléˈàà ‘king.acc’ (Sauzet 1989, Golston 1990) and two additional classes, H*L in basiˈléù ‘king.voc’ and H in basiˈleús ‘king.nom’.