Andrew,

always pleased to help. :)

> Tokyoites (and foreigners). There is a relatively
> standard notation, however: the word is written in
> kana and a line is draw over the portion of the word
> that has high pitch.

Right, right, I forgot about that one. In fact, it's also the method used in
my NHK pronouncing dictionary: kana + line over the "high-pitch" parts.

> The number notation which I proposed above
> is used in the 大辞林 (daijirin) dictionary

Yes, that's one of the famous ones. If anything at all, you'll find numbers
in monolingual dictionaries.

> :Realistically, I can't see any alternative to the
> number notation. We don't want to go down the roomaji
> road, because many if not most students of Japanese
> absolutely detest roomaji.

(slightly off-topic:
Actually, that's such a lame argument, and I keep hearing and hearing it
again. Some people say that using roomaji (=latin transcription of Japanese)
will lead to a faulty pronunciation - and using the "real" characters
wouldn't. Come on, whenever I learn a foreign language, I have to learn a
new orthography. I know that I have to treat the same string of characters
in a different way, depending on whether it's French, German, English or
Japanese. It's just a certain way of writing it down. I don't pronounce
French "nation" like English "nation" just because they're written the same
way. And likewise, it's just one big prejudice that using roomaji will
automatically lead to an erroneous pronunciation, that's just an urban myth.
If you know the rules, and if you know how to pronounce it properly, then
roomaji will be perfectly fine.)
(Of course, it's true that if you don't force yourself to use kana, you'll
never reach an acceptable reading speed. But that's a different story).

> Kana with lines or acutes
> over doesn't seem a very good solution either. And the
> number notation '''is''' brilliant.

It could be called "brilliant" because it's simple, not requiring any
special layout features.

> It is easy to
> understand and can readily be extended to phrases
> longer than one word (e.g. the accent of 臨機応変
> (rinki ouhen) can be denoted 1-0).

Actually, that's a bad idea. Compounds very often have a different accent
than their components.
niHOn (that's actually yet another way of writing the pitch!), but niHONGO,
niHONJIn. DOitsu, but doITSUjin.
You see, there are some complicated things going on. I would annotate every
entry seperately.


Including this method (using CASE to indicate pitch, which by the way makes
all this on-topic again ...), we have already two ways which don't involve
any special typographical features in the computer and could be rendered as
plain text.
1. numbers: nihon [2]
2. case: niHOn

> This raises some more questions. I'd like to know more
> about these "accent dictionaries". What is the
> Japanese name for them?

アクセント辞典 (akusento jiten, "accent dictionary").


There are two major ones:

1. The NHK pronouncing dictionary:
NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典 (NHK nihongo hatsuon akusento jiten, "Dictionary
of Japanese Pronunciation [and] Accent").
http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4140111127/249-8981128-6531568


2. Sanseido's pronouncing dictionary:
新明解日本語アクセント辞典 (shinmeika nihongo akusento jiten, "Shinmeika
Dictionary of Japanese Accent")
http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/438513670X/qid%3D1094455629/249-898
1128-6531568

Sanseido claims that whereas the NHK (=Japanese television) describes the
theoretical "kyoutsuugo" (standard language) used all over the country,
their own little dictionary concentrates on the actual pronunciation in
Tokyo, mostly taking elderly citizens or Tokyo as sources and also listing
Tokyo-isms.
And that they have more entries, provide more detailed information ....and
that their dictionary is generally better, of course. ;-)
http://www.sanseido.co.jp/publ/dicts/jap_acc.html#11

Personally, I only have the NHK version - the Japanese equivalent of a BBC
pronouncing dictionary -, and can recommend the linguistically interesting
annex. (written in Japanese, no translation available, I'm afraid)

> How much would I need to pay for one?

1. NHK: about 4000 Yen
2. Sanseido: about 3800 Yen

> Are they available for dialects besides Tokyo? Would
> the same accent system work for all the major
> dialects?

Yes, e.g. for the Kansai-dialect (関西弁 kansai-ben) which is used in the
West of Japan (mainly Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe), there are some books available,
because this dialect is fortunately still alive and kicking.

No, they don't have the same accent system. For instance, you don't have
this "seesaw-principle" of the standard language and can have all the
syllables of a word in the same pitch.

> Does Unicode have the "L-shaped" symbol? Has it been
> proposed? Are the Unicode people on this list aware of
> it?

I am very confident that Michael Everson could tell us right away. :)
Well, perhaps something like this (or at least, similar to this) exists as a
box-drawing character, a relic from terminal days.

John Cowan was so kind to forward it to the Unicode list, thank you!
(And I hope he will inform us about the result).

> Can anybody point me to a web page or scan me a
> picture of this symbol being used with kana only?

Hm, haven't seen it in combination with kana yet, I guess.

> Obviously I don't necessarily agree with Yajuu's view
> that Wiktionary should use one of the number systems.

> I'd like to know as much as possible about the
> typographical systems first.

But you should also bear in mind that Wiktionary is very online in its
nature and we have to consider what will actually work.

For instance, ruby markup (=furigana) is neat and everything, but virtually
no browser supports it so far. Likewise, the utmost priority is it find a
solution which can be displayed without any problems on most systems.

Therefore, at least for the time being, a plain text method seems to be
preferable to me.
(As soon as our browsers support more complicated typographical stuff,
someone can write a little program to automatically convert one method of
marking the pitch to another one.)





Greetings from Beijing,
Berthold



P.S.:
A new proposition for you guys: just use superscript for the high-pitch
passages. And in addition, write the number, counting from the left if this
makes Yajuu happy, for people whose browser doesn't display the mark-up
properly.

Alternatively, print the accented syllable in bold style, dou deshouka?




---
Berthold Frommann
Free University Berlin, Department of East Asian Studies