Re: Tone/Pitch Accent Question

yonjuuni@earthlink.net wrote a lot:

<<snip>>

Thanks so much for your thorough explanation.   I have a couple more 
questions.

<<In the pitch-accent languages I know of, the number
of tone melodies is the same as (or one more than) the number of
syllables.>>

So,if I'm understanding you write, for a given form, if that form consists of 
three syllables, then the number of possible tone melodies is three or four?  
 This would work for a form like "kanama", without contours, which could be 
HL, LH, H or L.

<<Every mora after that drop is low, and every
mora up to that point is high, with the first two morae being of
different pitch.>>

I'm not exactly sure I understand.   Up to the second comma, it sounds like y
ou could never LHL or HLH, but then you say the first two morae could be 
different, and you gave an example:

<<Hashì ga (bridge)     = LHL>>

Looking at your previous example:

<<Hàshi ga (chopsticks) = HLL>>

One would predict that the syllable with the grave accent gets a high tone, 
and everything after gets low.   Why is it that every mora up to that accent, 
though, is not high, as evidenced in "bridge"?

Additionally, how could one predict the following form:

<<Hashi ga (tip, edge)  = LHH>>

By the why, your /gengo/ example was very good, and my language does the same 
thing, so that, at least, is good.

<<(for high words, all morae after the accent are low, all before are high)>>

Oh, wait, I think I get it!   So it just matters whether a word has an accent 
or not.   So then, "bridge" is low, unaccented, and it gets a high tone on 
the stressed syllable, and default low elsewhere.   Wow!   What a neat system!

Okay, last question: What's the difference between accent and stress?

Jesse wrote:

<<However, there are tone languages that are not strictly algorithmic, in
which some tones are pre-attatched to some syllables, which would allow
both patterns above to exist in the same language.>>

I had this idea that some syllables could have underlying tone.   One thing 
that it seems doesn't happen, though, is for a syllable to have an underlying 
low tone.   Have you (or has anyone else) ever heard of something like this?

Thanks for the help!

-David

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