As many of you surely know, Japanese has a pitch
accent and there are many words with identical
pronunciation which are distinguished only by the
accent. I am very interested in how dictionaries have
illustrated this accent - especially Japanese
monolingual dictionaries.

It seems the vast majority don't show it at all. The
only ones I've found so far have been a very few
Japanese<->English dictionaries. The one I have shows
just an acute accent on one syllable, only in the
Romaji. The other system I have seen but do not have
available to check. I seem to remember that it uses an
acute to show where a word raises in pitch and a grave
to show where it is lowered again - again only in the
Romaji.

I don't know much about Japanese pitch accent but it
seems these two systems are not even compatible. And I
never heard any more information about how it is
shown, if ever, in dictionaries which don't use
Romaji.

I am also interested in whether there is Unicode
support for any of the systems besides acute and
grave,
possibly combined with macrons, on the latin vowel
letters.

Andrew Dunbar.


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