Re: Open questions on Chevraqis

On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> writes:
> > My idea was that (as in Korean? and Japanese) the accented syllable has
> > higher pitch.  I didn't actually conceive of anything more complex.  The
> > rules for Japanese, if I understand the !@#$ thing correctly, are actually
> > a bit more complicated than that, but I knew nothing formally about
> > pitch-accent when I had the idea.  :-/
>
> Actually, I just bought `The Languages of Japan' and it tells me that
> the Japanese pitch rules are not only more complex than your current
> rule, but that they are also totally different from town to town. :-)
> There seem to be towns that only have one pitch.  That's quite
> monotonic, then. :-)
Eek!  Do they use something else instead...?
My current rule is pretty lousy.  I want to find out how Korean handles
pitch accent (but the grammars I find in bookstores don't even seem to
mention it, unlike most of the Japanese grammars I've seen--'course, with
Japanese there are a lot *more* grammars to be had!) and see if it does
anything differently.  I swear I had the hardest time figuring out the
"default" rules in my books until I saw a book that had lines above all
the Japanese phrases for high and low pitch, and then I "got" the
pattern.  I'm slow.  :-)

> One thing I liked was that obviously there are words that have the
> accent after their last mora.  So accents are theoretically not
> assigned to morae in Japanese, but to mora boundaries (so for an
> n-moraic word, there are n+1 possible accent positions).
Yes--that was quite neat.  I'm still not quite sure how to handle
pitches over sentences; I've been going through _Conversational Japanese_
and "resetting" to low pitch, but half the things I read sound funny
because of the pitch.  And that's really bizarre, because it certainly
doesn't "sound funny" in Korean unless someone high-pitches the wrong
syllable.  :-p  Must...watch...more...anime...

YHL