Re: NATLANG: pitch accent question

En réponse à Jonathan Knibb :

>If I understand correctly, Japanese (a language rarely discussed round
>here - wonder why?)
Because it has been extensively discussed in the last few years, so people
are getting a bit bored about it ;))) .

>  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.
Indeed.

>Two questions for you all.  Firstly: am I right?
Yes. Japanese has phonemic pitch accent. There are two pitches, high and
low, and the accent position is always the one of the high-to-low change.
When you know the position of this accent, you know how to pitch every mora
(Japanese pitch-accent is mora based rather than syllable-based, which
means that you can have a change of pitch in the middle of a long vowel and
that the coda n always has its own pitch). There are three possibilities:
- the accent is on the first mora of the word. So the first mora will be
high-pitched, and all the others will be low pitched, including any
postposition and clitic afterwards.
- the accent is on some other mora. In this case, the first mora will be
low-pitched, the following ones will be high-pitched until the accented
mora, and the next ones will be low pitched. If the last mora of the word
has the accent, the whole word except the first mora will be high-pitched,
but the postpositions following it will be low-pitched.
- the word is unaccented. Yes, it happens! In that case, the word will be
pitched as if the last mora was accented (first mora low-pitched, the rest
high-pitched), but the possible postpositions and clitics afterwards will
alos be high-pitched :) .

>   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?
I think pitch-accent is pretty common. And if you want something else, you
can even consider register tone, as found in Hausa for instance. I think
it's lexical (i.e. phonemic) too.

Conlangwise, my Notya has pitch-accent, but it's not lexical per se.
Rather, a word in Notya has a circumflex pitch, with the maximum of pitch
on the last syllable of the root, and the pitch going down on both sides.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.