STRESS ACCENT and PITCH ACCENT

9 comments

1. It’s not about loudness, but about the pitch of the sound. Those are 2 different qualities.

2. They’re just two different systems that developed differently, like how different languages develop. In a stress accent language like English, the emphasizes syllable in a word is said with more force than the surrounding syllables. This causes the pitch to raise slightly, but it’s really about the amount of air used and the emphasis placed.

   Japanese is much more focused on pitch, i.e., purely the tone, like a musical scale. Of course there is emphasis in Japanese but that’s not the focus of the pronunciation system.

   If English is your native language, since we’re used to stress accent, many English speakers make the mistake of emphasizing mora in Japanese and hearing mora as emphasized when it should primarily be a difference in pitch.

   This is just my understanding. I’m not an expert like Dogen though. Try practicing on the [Migaku Pitch Trainer web app](https://pitch-demo.migaku.io/) and [Kotu Minimal Pair trainer app (you need to make an account for this one)](https://kotu.io/tests/pitchAccent/perception/minimalPairs). It’s not the most important part of learning Japanese, but it is a component.

3. It really isn’t just about loudness. English stress is caused by a number of factors including pitch, vowel length, loudness, or vowel quality. On the other hand, Japanese pitch accent is focused specifically on the high and low sounds without the other factors influencing it.

   For example, given two words in Japanese such as 雨 and 飴 or 橋 and 箸, the difference is primarily on pitch. High and low and the ordering of the sounds.

   Compare to English stress with words like record (noun) and record (verb). When you say “record a record”, the vowel qualities actually change a bit. For example, the “re” in record (noun) may sound like a /reh/, but it might become /ree/ in the verb so that it’s slightly longer. This wouldn’t work in Japanese, as that change in vowel may elongate the vowel into a completely different word (I.e. おばさん and おばあさん)

   Wikipedia sums it up well:

   > The terms stress and accent are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called pitch accent, and when produced through length alone, it is called quantitative accent.[3] When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called stress accent or dynamic accent; English uses what is called variable stress accent.

4. Pitch means sound frequency; tones; how high-pitched or low-pitched a sound is (**edit 2:** physically, how fast or slow the sound source, e.g. your vocal chords, is vibrating).

   Accent, in this context, refers to a stressed/emphasised (or *accented*, hence the name) part of a word. There are multiple accent *systems*, i.e. ways to accent a part of a word.

   Japanese uses *pitch* accent, i.e. utilises *pitch* to accentuate parts of words. Specifically, downsteps (i.e. sudden drops in pitch). In Japanese, the downstep is *the* accent itself, and it accents the preceding mora. So in a word like 世界, because the downstep happens from せ to か, the accent falls on せ; せ is made to feel more prominent to Japanese people’s ears. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean the せ part can’t be louder too, but that’s a *secondary* effect. せ doesn’t need to, nor will it always be, louder than the rest of the word, and it’ll never be the *loudness* that makes it feel accented, even if it *is* there.

   English uses *stress* accent. This might sound like a bit of a weird name if you think about it, because it basically means “stress stress”, but that’s because English doesn’t rely only on a single element of sound to place accents; it just uses stress “in general”. More specifically, to accent a part of a word, English uses: (a) syllable length, (b) loudness, and (c) a spike in pitch. However, pitch isn’t *always* involved, and *need not* be involved for you to perceive a syllable as accented — we mostly rely on length and loudness. More info [**here**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU&t=209s).

   **Edit:** Relevant Wikipedia pages:

   – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)

   – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch-accent_language

5. Which languages are classified as stress-accented and which as pitch-accented is a bit conventional and not that clear. In reality almost all languages use a combination of both and many other factors to mark accent nucleus.

   The loudness of accented moræ in Japanese is indeed slightly higher, but not as much as in English. The Pitch of accented syllables in English is significantly higher, so much so that apparently in manipulated recordings that level pitch, native speakers can no longer reliably identify the accented syllable and thus rely on pitch to do so. I have heard that Russian is an example of a language that only uses loudness and vowel neutralization to indicate accent nuclei but I haven’t read anything that shows it.

   There are also many other things that come into play in Japanese than the pitch contour to mark what native speakers perceive as the accented mora and the model Dōgen teaches is simplistic, while definitely having utility as a teaching tool to train people to practice and understand a more faithful reproduction, it is very far from descriptive linguistics, and some of the sketches suggests to me that he does not truly understand how native speakers perceive it. In one of his sketches he implies that native speakers of Japanese would not be able to tell “鼻” and “花” apart in isolation or when uttering them themselves. From what I understand they are capable of discriminating both in recordings with decent reliability, and certainly when being asked to say them themselves. They are not pronounced the same, they are only pronounced the same in the simplistic model that Dōgen often teaches, which, while having didactic utility, does not reflect reality.

   http://hasegawa.berkeley.edu/Accent/accent.html

   https://twpl.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/twpl/article/view/6174

6. “when it comes to the せ [in 世界 せかい] it has a higher pitch”

   The せ in 世界 せかい has a higher pitch than the rest of the word. It is not louder or longer.

   Unlike in English, where the accented syllable is spoken more forcefully (louder, longer, and often (at least in part as a result of the increased loudness) at a higher pitch.

7. Japanese and English can both use stress and pitch (and as some have pointed out, stress involves pitch). In fact, every language uses these features in some way or another (tonal languages could be thought of as just “tone accent” languages the way English is a stress accent language and Japanese is a pitch accent language). The way a language uses these features in a sentence is called “prosody”, wherein stress, tone and pitch would be a few prosodic elements.

   The difference between a stress accent language and a pitch accent language is that stress is not an *inherent* part of a Japanese word the way it would be in English. As Dogen says somewhere in the course, Japanese people can stress words for emphasis, but the way a word would be stressed is very different to English, because it follows the inherent pitch contour of the word. For example, multiple syllables may be stressed in one word in Japanese, and the stress needs to be even on all of them, whereas English words are stressed by taking the inherently stressed syllable and just stressing them even harder.

8. I would advise against trying to understand pitch accent by how it is different from stress accent because it is not a clean dividing line. There are a lot of ways in which they are the same/similar depending on how you decide to draw the line, but for the most part it is arbitrary, as everything in language technically is.

   Pitch accent is relative pitch, meaning the actual pitch will vary person to person, it will just be higher or lower than the preceding and following sounds. Take your time figuring out how best you personally can make sense of it- if you keep in mind that it exists you will eventually recognize it. It is not something someone can just tell you and you understand immediately.

9. [Found a good resource after that](https://voice.weill.cornell.edu/voice-evaluation/normal-voice-function)