Re: NATLANG: pitch accent question

On Thursday 01 May 2003 02:53 am, Jonathan Knibb wrote:
> If I understand correctly, Japanese (a language rarely discussed round
> here - wonder why?) has contrastive tone, but the pattern of tones is
> organised on the word level, by the position (and choice?) of a pitch
> accent, in a similar way to the Swedish system.
>
> Two questions for you all.  Firstly: am I right?  Secondly: are there
> any other natlangs (or conlangs for that matter) that organise tone on
> a lexical level, and do they have interestingly different ways of
> achieving this?
>
> ObConlang: I need this kind of structure for Telona and I'm not sure
> how to go about creating it in a naturalistic way.
>
> Thanks!
> Jonathan.
>
> [reply to jonathan underscore knibb at hotmail dot com]
> --
> 'O dear white children casual as birds,
> Playing among the ruined languages...'
> Auden/Britten, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'
>
>
I'm not sure what you mean by contrastive tones on a lexical level.
Standard Japanese has standard tone patterns. But they happen more on
the sentence level, and I can't think of any specific words that differ
only by tone pattern. Also, there are major regional differences in the
tone patterns (I think it's the Osaka area that basically doesn't have
them at all, and the patterns in Hokkaido are very different from the
Tokyo standard.)
--
Elyse Grasso

The World of Cherani Station
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/index.html
Cherani Tradespeech
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/tradespeech.html

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