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From: ludemann@netcom.com (Peter Ludemann)
Subject: Re: How did Korean lose the tones?
Message-ID: <ludemannD29LH8.A62@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <1995Jan6.215248.9102@galileo.physics.arizona.edu> <1995Jan11.015052.7766@midway.uchicago.edu> <3evn6k$fv8@panix3.panix.com> <aldersonD294Ls.48y@netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 1995 23:34:20 GMT
Lines: 34

In article <aldersonD294Ls.48y@netcom.com>,
Richard M. Alderson III <alderson@netcom.com> wrote:
>The Greek accent system patterns very much like that of modern Japanese, more
>like those dialects in which a fall occurs in a bimoric syllable with the
>accent on the first mora.  (It's been a very long time since I last looked, so
>I don't remember whether Kyoto or Osaka is an exemplar.)  Recent work on this
>issue as reflected in ancient musical notations appears in papers by Devine.

The classic example in Japanese is the word "hashi", which depending
on the intonation (pitch accent, as opposed to stress accent) means
"bridge", "chopsticks", or "edge".  The intonation changes depending
on (a) the preceding and following words and (b) what part of the
country you're in [as a rough rule, the intonation is opposite between
the east (Tokyo or "standard" Japanese) and west (Kyoto/Osaka)].
Beginning Japanese students are told to ignore intonation and to speak
in more-or-less a monotone.  Nobody has trouble understand a monotone
and wrong intonation can have amusing results (mixing up short and
long vowels can have even more amusing results).

Given this, Japanese is not a tonal language.  The fact that the two
major dialects have opposite tonal patterns but are mutually
understandable is further evidence.  On the assumption that Korean is
a (distantly) related agglunative language, it's not surprising that
its tonal patterns have changed over time.

(By the way, something similar exists in English, examples being the
American and British stress patterns in words such as "adult" (noun
and adjective forms), "permit" (noun and verb forms), "ancillary", etc.).




-- 
Peter Ludemann                      ludemann@netcom.com
