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父 and 乳 cannot be differentiated by pronunciation (including accentation). While the word titi "father" is attested in Old Japanese (8th century), titi "breasts" is not extant until the 17th century. However, it is more complicated than that. titi "breasts" is a reduplication of ti "breasts" which is extant in OJ. Also, titi "father" seems to be a ...

You may be familiar with the concept of sentence-level pitch changes in English; for example when you are asking a question, you end the sentence with a rising pitch to indicate that it is indeed a question. Japanese also has sentence-level pitch changes, but more relevantly to this question, it has word-level pitch changes. In the standard (Tokyo) ...

This is the result of a well known devoicing rule in Japanese. Devoicing means that there is no vibration of the vocal folds. For example, the difference between [s] and [z] is only that [z] is voiced. The IPA diatric for devoiced phones is a circle at the bottom of the glpyh eg [z̥]=[s]. Although there is still much dialectual, idiolectual (the way a ...

I believe so. I can't find an explicit affirmation (I provided sources which I've read before, but I could have forgotten or missed such a statement), but for present tense adjectives in the Kyoto-Osaka dialect, it seems the accent falls on the antepenultimate mora (third to last) for trimoraic words or longer, otherwise it falls on the penultimate mora for ...

Very insightful point! I think you are right that pitch matters. As a case in point, say if my daughter is reading a textbook aloud in homework and gets a pitch wrong, I would correct her, because it's noticable. On the other hand, Japanese dictionaries written for Japanese do not have the pitch information either, and people from different regions often ...

If not, does anyone have a reasonable explanation for why 父 and 乳 have the same pronunciation I do have one: the relatively limited number of words than can be made from composing the sounds of kanas. You are doomed to have either a lot of homophones, or a lot of very long words… I believe that evolution led to having shorter words with collisions ...

Japanese is mostly understandable to native speakers with incorrect pitch. There are a few words like "shiro", 城 or 白, which can be confused depending on context. If you are worried about pitch accent, there are dictionaries of pronunciation such as the NHK published one, "日本語発音アクセント辞典". This is intended for native speakers who want to speak like TV ...

Not all ambiguous pairs can be distinguished by pitch, and we could just as easily provide you with loads of other ambiguous statements where NOTHING other than context could lead you to the right meaning. This kind of thing happens in all languages: in English, if I tell a female friend "You have a nice pair/pear", she'll rely on context (I hope) to tell ...

I have made 2 videos that offer a general overview of the system (a third is yet to come): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeaLEC6KO20 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKWrmxYmdy4 You can also consult my page on pitch accent (which is also referenced in the Wikipedia article another user mentions), although it's still very much a work in progress: ...

Standard Japanese has what is known as a "downstep" accent rather than free pitch accent like some dialects (notably Kansai) have. Basically, the "accent" in the handbooks represents the last high syllable. Thus, "na-tsu-ka-SHI-i" would be pronounced "na-TSU-KA-SHI-i". The downstep is after the "shi". The first syllable is always low unless a downstep ...