Talk:Japanese pitch accent

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Contents 1 comparison with Navajo 2 a nice paper 3 perception by native Japanese speakers 4 Accent vs. Emphasis 5 Soundclips

[edit] comparison with Navajo

just a comment:

Apache lanuages and Navajo are usually described as a tonal languages. Japanese is usually described as an accent language (although a paper has been written claiming otherwise). so the statement may be misleading to not-so-careful readers. - Ish ishwar 00:38, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)

[edit] a nice paper

The Tokyo & Osaka pitch accent varieties are nicely summarized in

• Haraguchi, Shosuke. (1999). Accent. In N. Tsujimura (Ed.), The handbook of Japanese linguistics (Chap. 1, p. 1-30). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-20504-7.

An online verison of this is available here:

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631234942%5C001.pdf

Cheers! - Ish ishwar 22:08, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)

[edit] perception by native Japanese speakers

I thought it important to point out that in my experience, most Japanese people are quite aware of the existence of pitch accent, and do not attribute it simply to differing kanji, as this article states.

LeeWilson 10:25, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Same here. I've had people coach me on the proper placement of the accent in their dialect (and in Tokyo people seemed well aware of this too). People could rattle off minimal pairs, usually with the idea that the accent pattern was just the opposite in Tokyo. And of course they understand you when you get the accent wrong - in Kansai and Shikoku they hear it that way on TV all the time, and in Tokyo no one had the slightest problem with my Kansai accent.

One thing that's not clear about the article: is it saying that the syllable after the accent has a falling pitch? (That's the only way it can work with the examples given.) As far as I know, Kansai allows falling pitch on final morae only, whereas Tokyo doesn't allow any at all. kwami 06:35, 2005 May 22 (UTC)

Here is "nonsense" that Kwamikagami has just deleted:

Accent is sometimes taught to non-Japanese learners of Japanese, but it is never taught to the Japanese themselves in grade school, so most of them are not explicitly aware of its existence. Most Japanese people who are not linguists will deny that there is any variation in pitch between Japanese syllables, since Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese. Unfortunately, this does not necessarily mean they'll understand you if you say KA-ki ("oyster") when you should say ka-KI ("persimmon"). They realize that they do pronounce these two words differently, but curiously enough, attribute this to a difference not of pitch but of kanji.

It seems to me that, while poor, this has some content that might be improved and preserved. Is accent taught to the Japanese at grade school? I hadn't thought so. Of course it's daft to attribute different pronunciations to different orthography, but this is what I have been told, in all seriousness -- of course by non-linguists. (I guess and hope that this is a minority opinion, even among non-linguists.) And, to comment on the objection raised above, of course people in Tokyo understand Kansai Japanese perfectly well and vice versa -- but that's not the point that was raised (rather clumsily) in the mostly-deleted passage, which is (unclearly) either (a) whether Japanese people understand the results of idiosyncratic L2 Japanese pitch accent, or (b) whether they understand the results of sprinkling one L1 dialect with samples of a different L1 dialect.

But I'd agree that a description of misunderstandings of pitch accent, if worth bothering with at all, is much less important than a clear presentation of a well-informed analysis of the facts. -- Hoary 02:53, 2005 Jun 7 (UTC)

I read this before it was deleted, and I can't help agreeing that it sounds very reasonble, though it would of course be good to have it referenced. I feel that kwami has of lately been way too eager to remove literally everything that is not to his personal agreement. As far as I know the comment about orthography sounds plausible considering how hard it seems for most people to let go of their native orthorgraphy when describing the phonetics of their own language. I mean, just have a look at our own language articles. The majority of the editors that don't have access to phonetic literature seem to revert to lists of how graphemes correspond to sounds by default when wanting to describe phonology, no matter if the orthography is phonemic i nature or not.

Japanese pitch accent is fairly similar to how tonal word accent works in Swedish, yet this is never explicitly taught in school to native speakers. This is simply because it's nothing that needs to be actively taught. Most Swedes have mastered the Swedish word accents before the age of 3 and are usually happily unaware that it is realized differently in other dialects than their own or might not even exist at all (like in Finland-Swedish).

Peter ^Isotalo 12:47, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

A comment that Japanese aren't taught standard (or even local) pitch accent in school is correct, as far as I know. For instance, many children across the country now use Tokyo pitch accent, and this is commonly attributed to the influence of television in spreading the standard language, not of school. I only took out the 'not learned in school' comment because it was a minor point in a misleading paragraph. The paragraph had two errors: getting the accent wrong does not make you unintelligibe as the paragraph suggested, the way that getting Chinese tone or English stress accent wrong can make you unintelligible; rather, it's more like speaking with a Southern US or Irish accent in English. Obvious, but not incomprehensible. (Rereading the paragraph, I see that the example was two foods, so that could be confusing if you just asked a shopkeeper if he sells "kaki" without any context to disambiguate.) And although I've met lots of Japanese who think the accent system is fun, and have taught me all sorts of minimal sets that they found amusing, I've yet to meet anyone who didn't recognize it or who attributed it to differences in kanji. I'm not saying that such people don't exist, but a blanket statement is at best misleading. I think some supporting evidence or testimonials (people who know from personal experience) would be in order. It sounds like Hoary does have such experience, so I'd be happy for him to restore the paragraph. It would be interesting to know whether people only say this about Sino-Japanese compounds, as in technical vocabulary, which people often disambiguate by drawing the kanji on their hand or in the air with their finger; or if he knows anyone who actually believes that the native Japanese words for oyster and persimmon are only differentiated by their kanji. (That would be odd.) And the examples given in the article are of everyday native vocabulary; technical terms of foreign origin, even if well integrated, create their own issues in many languages. (Think of Greek terms in English.) We should have the qualification, though, that lots of Japanese are quite aware of the pitch accent system. It's just as much in people's consciousness as desert and dessert are in English. (Who knows, maybe some English speakers believe the only difference between those words is their orthography!) As one concrete example, many (most?) monolingual Japanese dictionaries give the pitch patterns for all entries, and these are explicitly described in terms of pitch, so any Japanese who uses a dictionary is likely to know that Japanese has lexical pitch variations.

As for my removing anything I don't personally agree with, I only removed this after LeeWilson made the same comment, and no one contradicted him for six weeks. Previously I hadn't touched it. It may have been rash, but at least now we're correcting the passage, which no one had bothered to do before. (Funny how saying "I'm deleting this nonsense" gets a discussion going when "I think this is wrong" gets no response at all.) kwami 19:09, 2005 Jun 8 (UTC)

[edit] Accent vs. Emphasis

I was wondering if anyone else thinks that it would be worthwhile to point out the difference between the Japanese way of emphasizing a syllable and the English way. I have heard many Japanese speakers mention that English speakers who learn Japanese often retain the habit of lengthening the emphasized syllable in addition to the pitch change, whereas Japanese speakers retain the same rythm no matter whether the syllable is emphasized or not. Mattopia 06:41, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Soundclips

I wonder if anyone can obtain or create some soundclips as examples. I think they'd be a great suppliment to this article.