Andrew,

I've just seen your new post:

> From Qalam this discussion has proagated now even to the Unicode mailing list,
> where these characters were mentioned:
> 02F9 ? MODIFIER LETTER BEGIN HIGH TONE
> 02FA ? MODIFIER LETTER END HIGH TONE
> These seem to be the right ones and I would like to encourage their use even
> if fonts and OSes are not supporting them properly yet. There is no reason not
> to have multiple systems as some Chinese and Korean entries, and the
> pronunciation sections already do. So full articles could have the
> acute/grave, the begin/end high tone, both numeric systems - especially if we
> can find labels for each system. (...) — Hippietrail 00:39, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yes, you should have multiple systems.

But I would definitely discourage indicating the beginning AND the ending of
high tone in one word. This is entirely redundant!



Either, you have no accent nucleus at all in a word (平板型 heiban-gata). In
this case, you *could* use 02F9 resp. the acute accent. But even better,
consider heiban-gata the default and don't mark it! (It will reduce your
work, because it applies for most words. What's more, among young Japanese
there's the tendency to pronounce more and more words like this.)

Or - you *have* such an アクセント核 (akusento-kaku, accent nucleus) and
just need to indicate where it is in the word. In this case, there's no need
to put an acute accent on the first vowel because it's self-evident that it
rises according to the "see-saw"-rule (provided it stands at the beginning
of a phrase, that is). 難しい should be muzukashìi, not múzukashìi.
You only need to mark the accent fall with a grave accent or 02FA.


See it like this: Write it phonemically, not phonetically.
Or should I rather say, tonemically? ^.^



Well, all this pitch information is worthless if one doesn't know about the
underlying rules.
日本の教育制度は変である。niHOn no kyouiku-seido wa hen de aru.
The entire rest after the pitch-fall is ignored, it remains low-pitched.

You see, you can annotate individual entries in the dictionary, but in the
final sentence, you still have to "process" them.
e.g.
日本の橋 niHOn no haSHI
日本の箸 niHOn no hashi
-> both becomes: niHOn no hashi


There you have it, the invisible, theoretical accent! ;-)




Greetings,
Berthold