Re: Japanese pitch accent representations

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 13:50:57 +0200, Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...> wrote:

>> Actually there shouldn't be any conflict. The Catalan middle
>> dot _does_ represent a syllable/hyphenation break, and (if I
>> understand correctly) is replaced by a hyphen when actually
>> used at a line break.
>
> 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?
>
> 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?

[Given that this is not a problem in Catalan, but assuming a pa·ral·lel language in which this is the case...]

This is, again, why I've been putting hyphenation on a separate line from the headword. There would be, in effect, three repetitions of the word: One in the page title, which is the word's everyday orthography; one in the hyphenation line, which shows where line breaks may be placed and any spelling changes a line-break would cause; and one in the headword just above the definitions, which shows the word spelled with any optional diacritics (such as Latin macrons, or Arabic vowel points).

It comes across as a lot, but the platonic ideal of a Wiktionary entry[1] is more like a short article about the word in question than entries in most print dictionaries (especially bilingual ones) are.

> 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").
>
> Old dictionaries (and some geographic atlases even today) used the acute for
> mandatory accents and the grave as phonetic symbol.

My Italian-English dictionary (1959) uses a similar sign to American English dictionaries for stress, thus _esempio_'s headword is "esemʹpio". As for differentiating open and closed o and e, it uses the orthographic marks when they are part of the orthography and it italicizes the e or o in question if it isn't. (This is distinctive, but not particularly mnemonic; I always forget whether the italic letter is supposed to represent the closed or open vowel.)

This again shouldn't be a problem in Wiktionary where the words, ideally, have their pronunciation given in IPA.[1]

*Muke!
[1] Idealism is nice, but in a volunteer project such as this many pages come quite incomplete.
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