The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic accent

ENThe historical picture developed in the preceding chapters is in principle very simple. Balto-Slavic, according to the view presented here, started out as a more or less typical early IE daughter language, with such features as a three-way opposition of voiceless, voiced, and breathy-voiced stops; a two-way opposition of long and short vowels; three laryngeals, later lost; a free word accent, realized as high tone, in all words not specified as clitics; and a mostly columnarized accent, even in originally mobile athematic paradigms. Not part of the IE inheritance of Balto-Slavic were glottalic stops, accentual mobility in thematic stems, or contrastive tone distinct from the normal word accent The BSl. evidence alleged in support of these and other non-standard features is not cogent.