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Philip Newton ([personal profile] pne) wrote in [personal profile] kake 2011-03-30 06:39 am (UTC)

I guess the change from 箸 to 筷 happened after Chinese characters were adopted for Japanese writing.

That seems quite possible.

Is Japanese intonation similar to Chinese tones?

No, not at all.

To my understanding, Japanese has pitch accent - so you don't have contour tones (rising/falling) on syllables, but each syllable is pronounced at a higher or lower level tone, and the pitch accent of a given word is (as I understand it) the position of the main drop from high to low in a word.

It's a bit more similar to English stress accent (the accented syllable is pronounced more loudly), except that instead of soft-and-loud, you have something involving low-and-high pitch.

For the three hashi, I think the intonation patterns are LH(H), LH(L), and HL(L) - the first two words sound the same in isolation (low "ha", high "shi") but are distinguished by whether there's a pitch drop after the second syllable or not, which can be seen by the pitch of a following particle - for example, in the phrase hashi ga (with the subject particle "ga").

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