XXVII. Stress and Pitch in Indian Languages

Extract

As our Society has published a communication on Indian phonetics, may I make a suggestion which may perhaps interest students of the Indian vernaculars? We all know that most languages have a musical quality which enables us to recognize what language is being spoken, even if we are too distant to hear the words used, or too ignorant to understand their sense. This characteristic quality is composed of stress and pitch. It has to be acquired by everyone who would speak like a native and would be readily and easily understood. It is not only by the meaning of words, but also by the significant modulation of a phrase that we make ourselves understood. It is very interesting, for instance, to note the change of stress and pitch when a word is borrowed from one language into another. This change is audible even when the borrowed word is pronounced by itself. It is even more obvious when the borrowed word forms part of the significant music of a phrase. So far, I am merely saying what is known to all students of living tongues. What I venture to suggest is that the characteristic modulation of a language may provide useful hints as to its origins and history, that the careful study of stress and tone may be a help to the philologist. This should particularly be the case where a language belonging to one family of human speech has been recently adopted by a race that once spoke a language of another family. It is easy, for instance, to feel an alien, a Celtic element in the pronunciation of English by an Irishman, a Highlander, a Welshman.