Germanic Tone Accents

To Germanic and Beyond: phonetic comparison of accents and languages

In recent work with Warren Maguire and Paul Heggarty, we have been exploring the possibilities for quantitative phonetic comparison of English accents. Currently, the ‘Sound Comparisons’ project (www.soundcomparisons.com) includes over 90 varieties of modern English. In some localities, up to three sub-varieties are also included to illustrate the potential of these techniques of comparison for...

Tone in Germanic: Comparing Limburgian with Swedish

Latin Modern: Enhancing Computer Modern with accents, accents, accents

The number of (free) fonts prepared with METAFONT is surprisingly small compared, e.g., to what is available in the commercial market in other formats. Well, perhaps not so surprisingly: METAFONT generates TEX-oriented bitmap fonts which have not become popular outside the TEX world. Accepting this irksome situation as a challenge, we have prepared METAType1, a package for generating fonts in t...

Intonation Contours “distorted” by Tone Patterns of Stress Groups and Word Accents

The present paper discusses the question if the interrogative vs. declarative mode of (short, elliptical) utterances can be determined solely by observing the pitch over time. To some extent, this may implicitly be claimed by a widespread analytic model according to which intonation should be specified in terms of a running summation of local ups and downs. Certainly, in speech technology the s...

Cladistic Methodology and West Germanic

For about a century and a half now one of the usual tasks of historical linguistics has been reconstructing the prehistory of linguistic communities. (That is, of course, the side of reconstruction that non-linguists are interested in.) A perennial question is what sort of model of linguistic diversification best fits the data. This paper will explore that question in the light of data supporti...