accentology

[Šọ̈́gala]

Are there are any non-Indo-European languages that have interesting diachronic accentology? I would appreciate links to papers or books that discuss them.

It's possible that the answer is no. Complex diacritic weight patterns in non-tonal languages do not strike me as terribly common and, since most non-IE languages have a relative dearth of data available, it might be impossible to reconstruct interesting accent patterns that did exist.

I'm trying to develop interesting stress-accent patterns for my conlang, but I have found very little to go on beyond Slavic, Greek, Vedic, and reconstructed PIE. I don't want to do a lot with tone, at least not in the contemporary form of the language. Japanese pitch-accent might be a promising avenue of research, although I understand historically Japanese was a more robustly tonal language than it is now (that's fine – I think the same is true of my conlang).

[Cedh]

Some of the Iroquoian languages have interesting accent-related sound changes, which are totally unlike what is familiar from Indo-European. Have a look at this summary, which is based on Julian, Charles (2010), "A History of the Iroquoian Languages".

[alynnidalar]

BTW, link's broken--there's hhttp instead of http.

Fixed link.

[Cedh]

BTW, link's broken--there's hhttp instead of http.

Fixed link.

Thank you!

[Šọ̈́gala]

Thanks, Cedh ... tons of fascinating sound changes in there. You're right – very different from Indo-European.