In English, Russian, Polish – dynamic accent: the accented syllable in a word is pronounced louder. (And in English and Russian unaccented syllables are significantly reduced, they are less clearly pronounced.)
In Japanese – pitch accent (pitch rises or falls). A word is considered to have an accented mora (mora = a beat, a unit of rhythm), if, and only if, a mora with a higher pitch is immediately followed by a mora with a lower pitch. No fall in pitch, no accented mora.
Japanese spoken words are composed of morae (singular: mora). A mora is a beat, a basic unit of rhythm.
Each mora has the same length, which means each mora occupies about the same amount of time.
(A mora shouldn’t be confused with a syllable – unfortunately, it often happens. They usually say syllable but mean mora.)
Each mora in a word has a pitch (higher or lower).
Morae (moras):
short vowel 1 mora
consonant + short vowel 1 mora
long vowel 2 moras
consonant + long vowel 2 moras
っ(small tsu, to double a consonant) 1 mora,
んN (uvular) 1 mora
So, in short: one mora = one kana character. (きゃ, etc are one character of course.)
簡単 かんたん – two syllables kan-tan, four morae ka-n-ta-n.
お父さん おとうさん – three syllables o-tou-san, five morae o-to-u-sa-n
The Rules:
L –lower pitch mora, H – higher pitch mora, ga - particle
1. The first and the second morae (or moras) in a word have different pitches (no LL or HH, only HL or LH). That does NOT mean that there are only two absolute pitches in Japanese. Once the pitch has risen, it can rise further, once it has fallen, it can continue to fall. In fact “we recognize four significant pitch levels: two accented levels (high and medium-high) and two unaccented levels (neutral and low). These are not absolute pitch levels but relative to each other within a given utterance.” (Harz Jorden). Only a fall from high or medium-high to neutral or low pitch is considered to be accented. For the sake of symplicity, we use only two levels: L and H.
2. The pitch in a word never rises again once it has fallen.
2.1. It means that if the first mora is accented (higher pitch followed by lower pitch), the remaining are low.
3. If the first mora has a lower pitch, the second mora has a higher pitch and the fall can happen on any of the following morae (and once it has fallen, it never rises) when there are more than two morae.
Eg. LHL, LHLLL, LHHL, LHH, LHHH, etc.
Words LH(....) are unaccented – no pitch fall – the following particle is high, too: LH(...)GA.
Words can be accented on the last high mora – the following particle is low (pitch falls) LH(...)ga.
Which rising-falling type a word belongs to is to be learnt by heart.
There are four types of accent:
1. head-high (first higher, the rest lower)
2. mid-high (first lower, second higher, and the fall somewhere, at least the last is low)
3. flat (first lower, second and the rest higher, no pitch fall) and the following particle higher pitch
– these words are considered to be unaccented
4. tail-high (first lower, second and the rest higher, but... the fall occurs on the following particle. (iNU, iNU ga iru)
So some ‘bare’ words can sound exacltly the same (homophones), but they belong to different types.
http://tisc.isc.u-toyama.ac.jp/pronuncia...tents.html
Online quiz (Introduction 1 B)
http://tisc.isc.u-toyama.ac.jp/raicho-cg...rm&test=47
