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(Read description!) Japanese Phonetics Episode 79—LIVE! (Patreon)

Published:
2020-07-04 07:47:10
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Note: The kanji at 6:55 should be not 起こり, but 怒り. Apologies for this mistake!

Bibliography
Japanese Phonetics Index Page

Good evening Patrons! The seventy-ninth episode of Japanese Phonetics is live! In this lesson we begin to look at pitch-accent in suffixes.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns with regards to this lesson, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below. Thank you very much for your continued support, and good luck with your Japanese studies!

Best from Beppu,

Dogen

Files

Previews only

Japanese Phonetics #79 Good-to-know suffixes

The seventy-ninth episode of Japanese Phonetics, my series dedicated to Japanese pitch-accent and pronunciation. In this lesson we begin to look at pitch-accent in suffixes. If you have any questions leave a comment below, and thank you all for your continued support! Bibliography: https://www.patreon.com/posts/17345632

Comments

Grant Benesh

Short and sweet! Thank you as always!

Alexander Walker

「おこりっぽい」の漢字は「怒りっぽい」ではないか？「起こりっぽい」が書かれています。間違っていますか？

Dogen
>>41040079

Sorry Alex, that's my mistake! It should indeed be 怒りっぽい. Cheers!

mjuditz

thanks for your efforts to synthesize all your research into an understandable intro to Japanese phonetics for learners. the discussions of both pitch-accent and phonemics and phonology have very much helped me focus on the main points- It is no doubt a lack of ear on my part but after watching the series I am left with doubts about what downstep and upstep actually involve. Based on the schematic diagrams the first is       yyyyyyyyyy xxxxxx lower flat, then higher flat and downstep is higher flat, then lower flat xxxxxxxx         yyyyyyy is this correct, or does up step involve a continuous upward slide in pitch? likewise does downstep not fact involve a continuous downward slide in pitch? I am particularly confused what happens when a heiban pattern begins on a syllable with two-mora syllable and when a marked syllable is a two-mora syllable (one diagram you used in discussing "kisha" seemed to indicate the vowels fall and rise rather than stay flat.) )spectrographs don't generally show flat lines. how should the steps be realized?

Dogen
>>93520524

Hi Mjuditz! I may be misunderstanding what you're asking, but generally speaking, a word's pitch will gradually rise until a downstep occurs. In heiban words, on the other hand, the pitch typicallys goes up a bit in the beginning, then very gradually drops off towards the end of the word. Note of course, that this doesn't take into account speaker emotion and intention, which can change things.

mjuditz

you addressed on point, thanks.

mjuditz

on my other point thanks i guess my question would best be resolved by spectrograms but i do not know where to access them the failing of the pitch diagrams is that they show syllables as points (this is fine for academic study of pitch accent patterns but complicates learning how to actually REALIZE the downstep even once one identifies the marked syllable.) i doubt anyone says a downstep on a heavy syllable (on a special sound,if you will) by pronouncing the first mora rising very high then pronouncing the second mora very low without any intermediate frequencies. .do i say high low with no transition, do i slide down partway on the first mora then partway on the second mora, or do i slide down on the second mora? (more Caribbean English or more North American English pitch?) i hope this formulation is clearer.,

Dogen
>>93568749

Hi Mjuditz, and thank you for the question. First, I'd like to say that you can download the free phonetics software PRAAT to generate spectrographs (you can feed it files that have already been created, or record directly into the software itself), and I imagine this could be very helpful for your studies. That said, and this may not be the answer that you're looking for, but I strongly believe that it's actually better to think of the downstep in simpler terms. That is to say, after deliberating a lot myself on exactly what a downstep is (exactly where it occurs, how far it should fall, etc.), I've come back that it's best to more or less think of it as a set of two moras, one high, and one low, and that you say them accordingly—i.e., the first mora is said high, and second mora is said low (this contrasts with the approach of trying to determine if there's a sort of slide in pitch that occurs either across the two or within one of the two). I've always come back to this simply approach because in actual speech there are so many things that can happen when it comes to speaker variation and emotion and intention that the more specific the model you use, the more it's likely to only be accurate some of the time. So again, though there often may be some sort of slide in pitch involved, I believe that the best way to at least frame a word such as ねこ (cat, an atamadaka word), in your head, is to simply think "ね is high, こ is low", and to use this framework when first listening to native speech and later when trying to say things yourself. Again, this probably isn't the reply that you were looking for, but it is what I believe to be the best way to think about things after spending some time pondering the topic myself. That said, you can always use PRAAT to try and explore things in more detail, and I've certainly learned many things from using PRAAT in the past. Hope this helps, and best of luck with your future studies!

mjuditz

thanks for the PRAAT pointer.