Abstract
Various researchers of the past are honoured in citations as the very first who described or discovered certain scientifically important phenomena. However, the illusion of "our times being superior to past" causes certain myopia: we often do not go back enough to identify and appreciate the true pioneers.
Generally, we tend to underestimate what our ancestors already knew and did, and we overestimate the contribution of our own era. The present paper demonstrates this predicament with the case of intonational downtrends, i.e., gradual lowering of phonologically equivalent melodic targets within an utterance.
The first report of the phenomenon is often attributed to K. L.
Pike, sometimes even to later intonologists. We, on the other hand, document several much older accounts of intonational downtrends, and offer some tentative explanations as to why the earlier research was ignored.