The Word Tone of the Standard Japanese Language

The problem of “accent” in the Japanese language has attracted the attention of a few Japanese scholars for some hundred years. In recent years more writers, both native and foreign, on the Japanese language have touched upon this problem. For instance, B. H. Chamberlain, A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese , 3rd ed., 1898, pp. 19–20; R. Lange, Lehrbuch der japanischen Umgangssprache , 1906, ss. xxvii–viii; E. R. Edwards, Étude phonétique de la langue japonaise , 1903, § 142 f., § 159. Native writers: S. Izawa, Kokutei Tokuhon Seidokuho (The Orthoepy of the State Text Books ); B. Yamada, Nihon Daijiten (Japanese Grand Dictionary ); T. Takahashi, Hatsuon Jiten (Pronouncing Dictionary) . Yet the results attained by these writers have not been quite satisfactory, as, for instance, Lange considers the Japanese “accent” to be that of stress, while Izawa thinks it is the delicate difference of length of speech-sounds. Yamada, Takahashi, etc., while they were right in thinking it to be difference of pitch, could not make out the pitch relations of the syllabic units of each word, and their method of indicating the “accent” was quite misleading

Linguistics · Stress (linguistics) · Syllabic verse · Tone (literature) · Word (group theory) · History · Linguistic Education and Pedagogy · Linguistic research and analysis · Philosophy · Psychology

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