[Memoirs of the Kern Institute, 4] xix, 196 pp. Leiden, etc.: E. J. Brill, 1988. Guilders 92.In this revised version of his 1987 Leiden doctoral dissertation Alexander Lubotsky investigates the problem of the unpredictable position of the accent in disyllabic nouns, with special reference to i- and u- stems and thematic stems. About half the work is devoted to the evidence of Sanskrit, with additional chapters on Greek and Germanic.
The starting-point of the investigation, however, is V. A. Dybo’s work on Balto-Slavic accentuation. Dybo’s findings were taken up by F. H. H. Kortlandt, who in an article entitled Proto-Indo-European tones? in Journal of Indo-European Studies, 14, 1/2 (1986), pp. 153-60 suggested that Proto-Indo-European had been a tone language in which each syllable had an inherently high or low tone and the position of the main word-accent could be predicted from the tonal characteristics (labelled (H)igh and (L)ow) of the syllables forming the word. When both syllables had the same tone, the accent fell on the first syllable.
The tonal character of syllables was itself said to be determined by the character of the stop(s) next to the syllabic nucleus. Voiced or voiced aspirated stops were associated with low tone and voiceless ones with high tone.
