Hey I’ve tried googling this a little bit, can’t find the specific answers I’m looking for, so I thought that warranted making a thread about it. This way, hopefully, anyone in the future who is googling this topic will find some useful info here.
As far as I can tell, there are at least three common conventions for writing pitch accents. This article (https://www.kanshudo.com/howto/pitch) does a great job of explaining the first two, which are to use lines above and below the kana to indicate high/low sounds, and also using a number to indicate which mora the downstep happens AFTER (with 0 meaning heiban, no downstep).
The third convention is the one I’m having a hard time finding info on, and that is using arrows to indicate rising/falling pitch. This convention is used in Wikipedia (or at least it is in the article about Japanese pitch accent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent), and it’s also used in a resource I’m attempting to integrate with my flashcard deck, which is the pitch accent database file used by Lorenzi’s Jisho: https://github.com/hlorenzi/jisho-open/blob/main/backend/src/data/pitch_accent.txt. This file does not really have documentation in Github, but it lists “nhk” as the “source” for every line, which I am guessing means it comes from NHK 日本語発音アクセント新辞典. This is not a book that I own, but I’ve done some google image searches and it appears that the physical book does NOT use the arrow notation, it uses overlines/underlines. The arrows themselves are fairly self-explanatory, of course, but the text file also uses other notations that I do not know how to interpret, for example:
>nhk;哀感;あꜛいかん
>nhk;哀歓;あꜛいかん
>nhk;哀願;あꜛいが~ん
>nhk;愛がん;あꜛいが~ん
>nhk;愛玩;あꜛいが~ん
>nhk;合着;あꜛいぎ~ꜜ
>nhk;合着;あꜛいぎ~
>nhk;連結器;れꜛんけつ*ꜜき
>nhk;連結器;れꜛんけꜜつ*き
>nhk;合い口;あꜛいく*ち
>nhk;自主規制;じꜛしゅき*ꜜせい
I know that ~ is often used as a lengthener, but I don’t think that’s what it means here…I’m GUESSING that it indicates that the mora before it is nasal, because that seems to be the pattern when I look up these words on the Lorenzi’s Jisho website, but I’m not entirely sure. Also, the * marking seems to correspond to the mora that is marked as “silent” on the website, with a dotted circle around them, but I don’t really understand how that makes any sense…is the く in あいくち really silent?! Or, does this indicate only that the VOWEL sound is silent, so it would be more “aikchi” than “aikuchi”? I’m used to that happening with く, and し, and stuff like that, but this marking is also present after the き in 自主規制 and I don’t think I’ve ever seen き pronounced without the vowel.
I would appreciate it if someone could explain what these markings indicate, and please also take this opportunity to explain anything else about pitch accent NOTATION that could be confusing to a beginner. Thank you!
by stileelits