Re: Split-Ergativity Madness

En réponse à David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

>
>     On a side note, has anyone heard anything about Swedish, Japanese
> and
> Serbo-Croat being pitch-accent languages?
>
Indeed! I know a little about Japanese pitch-accent (which is semantic, some
homonyms differ only by pitch accent), but not enough vocabulary to give you
anything else but theoretical explanations. In Japanese, each mora (yes, each
mora: long syllables count for two moras and the 'n' counts for one) has high
or low pitch. There are three main patterns of pitch for Japanese words:
- high-low,
- low-high,
- low-high-low.

When a word begins with a low pitch, this low pitch lasts for only one mora.
The other ones can last more than one mora and there's no rule about their
length. Words that begin with high pitch always end with low pitch (there's no
word that is completely with high pitch, IIRC). So, for a four mora word
(like 'karaoke', 'kanpai', or whatever), you have all those possibilities of
pitch contour:
- high-high-high-low
- high-high-low-low
- high-low-low-low
- low-high-high-high
- low-high-high-low
- low-high-low-low

Moreover, words that end in high pitch are also separated into two categories:
words that extend this high pitch to particles when they follow the word (so
that if you add the theme marker wa to such a word, it will be in high pitch),
and words that don't (so that if you add the theme marker wa to such a word, it
will remain in low pitch). Some homophonous words with identical pitch contour
have only this particularity to make them different.

Anyone with more knowledge of Japanese than me, please correct the mistakes I
may (or must) have made. I'm not a specialist of Japanese, just a manga fan who
happened to have two years of Japanese lessons.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr