2

Is there anywhere I can find a list of words and what their reconstructed pitches were in Middle Japanese? Or especially what words we have tone dot information on (with a preference for the oldest forms)? The more words I could get the better, but any help would be appreciated. I've already tried to look for resources but have only found a few words for any given class.

5
  • 6
    Asking for resources is not allowed here, so you can expect this to be closed. However, I will answer your question before. There are a number of well known historical texts containing accent markings. The single most important is 類聚名義抄. There are multiple (largely incomplete) manuscripts, though. Luckily the scholarship has already been done extracting all such words with accent information and compiled into a single source. Look for 類聚名義抄、四種声点付和訓集成 by 望月郁子.
    – Dono
    Commented May 10, 2018 at 3:26
  • @Dono Sorry about that, and thank you for pointing me in a new direction Commented May 10, 2018 at 4:52
  • Martin's The Japanese Language Through Time has wordlists with this information compiled from various Japanese sources. If you have difficulty in finding this old book, mail me at leoboiko on gmail and maybe I can help. By the way, you might want to know that there are two competing theories on how to interpret the MJ tone notation; the mainstream Japanese reconstruction by Kindaichi seems straightforward, but see Ramsey, Language Change in Japan and the Odyssey of a Teisetsu and De Boer, The historical development of Japanese pitch accent for problems & an alternative analysis. Commented May 23, 2018 at 10:02
  • @boiko It's easy enough to find to purchase but outside my current budget. So I'll just put it on my growing reference book wishlist. Thank you for the suggestions Commented May 24, 2018 at 17:02
  • If you'd like, e-mail me and I can get you some data. Commented May 29, 2018 at 7:40

0

You must log in to answer this question.