From: Andrew Dunbar
Message: 3536
Date: 2004-09-05
> Dear Andrew,have
>
> > 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
> > shows just an acute accent on one syllable, onlyhttp://member.newsguy.com/~sakusha/dict/martin-je.html
> > 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.
>
> There are several different systems to accomplish
> this:
>
> 1. accent marks (acute, grave)
> 2. numbers (counting from the front or back)
> 3. using L for "low" and H for "high". (e.g. LHLL
> for "toshokan"); but you'll find this mainly in
> linguistic papers rather than in dictionaries.
> 4. using a .... (how to describe it?) .... L-like
> shape rotated by 90 degrees when the pitch raises
> and the mirror-image of this when the pitch
> comes down again.
>
> Two links to illustrate number 4:
>
>http://member.newsguy.com/~sakusha/dict/kenkyusha-je.html
>Thank you for your very detailed and informative
> In different Japanese dialects, there are entirely
> different accent systems. But in standard Japanese,
> there are the following rules:
>
> - if the first syllable is L, then the second
> syllable must be H (and vice versa). Seasaw-
> principle.
> - the pitch stays high until you encounter an
> accented syllable, an accent nucleus. After this,
> it drops.
> - as soon as the pitch gets low, it stays low (up to
> the end of your phrase).
>
> Because of these rules, you would just have to mark
> the accented syllable - and you're done. The pitch
> of the other syllables can be determined by the
> rules (i.e., you only have to mark where the pitch
> falls). That's why many dictionaries (esp.
> Monolingual Japanese ones) just show some innocent-
> looking numbers, but depending on the dictionary you
> use, they either count from the front or from the
> back.
> AFAIR, the NHK Pronouncing Dictionary counts from
> the front, which is a bit inconvenient sometimes.
> (the ending -shii of adjectives always has the
> accent on the "shi", so both "muzukashii" and
> "urayamashii" would be [2] if counting from the
> back, but [4] resp. [5] when counting from the
> front ...)
>
> If a word doesn't contain any accent nucleus, it is
> marked as [0]. Such a word inherits the pitch of
> what came before of it. Only at the beginning of
> a phrase, it's LH...... (and then staying H).
>
> Typographically speaking, using numbers is certainly
> the most convenient and most widely available
> method, for it can be used on all computer systems
> (in contrast to accented characters or special
> marks).