Re: Japanese pitch accent representations

Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

> The fact that the two symbols have the same semantics does not mean that
> there is no conflict. On the contrary, that makes the conflict even more
> confusing: they have the same shape, the same meaning, so how is the reader
> supposed to know which ones are part of the orthography and which ones are
> just part of the dictionary's orthophonic symbols?

In the Catalan case, it happens to be simple: a dot appearing between
two l's is orthographic, one appearing elsewhere is not, and there is
never a syllable break inside an ll-digraph (which represents [l_j]
in Catalan, as in normative Castilian).

> E.g., when you see an entry such a as "pa·ral·lel", how are you supposed
> to know that the first middle dot should be removed in writing, while
> the second should be retained?

Exactly because the first dot does not appear between a pair of l's,
whereas the second dot does.

> We have a similar problem in Italian with acute and grave accents: some
> of them are mandatory in the Italian orthography (such as the acute on
> "però" = 'but': "pero" means 'pear tree'), while others are only used
> on dictionaries to show the position of the accent (such as the one on
> "esèmpio").

My Italian textbook, IIRC, uses a dot below to indicate the placement
of stress in words written without an orthographic accent. It also uses
the same diacritic under s and z to indicate the voiced pronunciation.

--
John Cowan cowan@... www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan
Rather than making ill-conceived suggestions for improvement based on
uninformed guesses about established conventions in a field of study with
which familiarity is limited, it is sometimes better to stick to merely
observing the usage and listening to the explanations offered, inserting
only questions as needed to fill in gaps in understanding. --Peter Constable