• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2024

help-circle
  • Pitch does, but accent placement counts mora but only assigns to syllables. For example, if an accent pattern will put an accent mid-syllable, the accent will move further back to the beginning of the syllable. This is also why accents only occur on the first mora of a long vowel. You can also see this in action in accent placement for compound nouns.

    Another good thing to know is that adjacent vowels within the same morpheme (typically one kanji) are part of the same syllable. So 帰る is an accented verb, so the accent goes one mora back from the end like with all accented verbs. But this would put the accent on the え in かえる, and かえ is one syllable here, so in fact the か gets the accent.

    Edit: I was looking over my main source[*] for this, and was reminded of one really good example of the role of syllables in accent assignment: genitive の. Nouns can lose their accent if followed by の, and when this occurs is exactly when (1) the noun is at least bisyllabic, and (2) the noun’s accent is on the final syllable. Thus monosyllabic 本 (ほ\ん) stays accented ほ\んの, but bisyllabic 日本 (にほ\ん) becomes unaccented にほんの, and 男 (おとこ\) becomes unaccented おとこの.

    [*] The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics (1999), edited by Natsuko Tsujimura, published by Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.



  • I think he titled it 7 because he explicitly presents 7 different cases. I’m not sure what you mean by saying three are the same though? Two are obviously exactly the same. Personally, I would only consider it three different “things”:

    • A uvular nasal at the end of an utterance.
    • The nasalization of a following consonant when that consonant has the tongue contacting the roof of the mouth.
    • The nasalization of a preceeding vowel when the following phoneme has the tongue not making contact.

    I think it’s fair to even say that it’s almost exactly one thing: an instruction to let air out of your nose whilst producing the surrounding phonemes.


  • You are correct (for standard Japanese 標準語 hyoujungo; other dialects can be quite different). NoneOfUrBusiness’s response is not a great take. Every word has an accented syllable or no accent at all (and it really is based on syllables, not mora). The accent is realized as a relatively sudden drop in pitch after the accented syllable with no (necessary) change in length or loudness. The drop can complete within the next syllable or after. Usually at the beginning of an utterance you start low, climb up in pitch to a certain point, and then either hit an accent and drop suddenly or gradually drop across a longer period of time if there’s no accent.

    The precise pitch does not matter, and it’s definitely possible to have two accents close together resulting in a high-mid-low kind of pitch pattern.

    Things are also complicated by the fact that Japanese likes devoicing certain syllables. Devoiced syllables can still be accented even though they can’t carry pitch in the same way as voiced syllables.





  • Idk if you’re a native speaker or not, but as a native speaker of American English there is absolutely nothing wrong with this to me. You could put it in about 4 different places:

    On Thursday the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced ____.

    The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday announced ____.

    The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced on Thursday that ____.

    The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced ____ on Thursday.

    The first one typically has a comma after “Thursday”. The second one you could offset “on Thursday” with commas. The third one is at best really awkward without a “that” or a question word (who, what, where, why, how) and you could offset “on Thursday” with commas; you can also drop the “on”, in which case you can’t use commas. The last one is possible but could be ambiguous (it could be that “on Thursday” is part of their announcement).