Special Interests thread

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Well, there is some truth to that, as most if not all Japanese dialects have pitch-accent, and some Korean dialects do too, although pitch-accent in Korean is dying out, and becoming stress-timed instead. But to the untrained ear you would most likely not be able to hear pitch-accent in some of the languages that have it, like Japanese and Korean, so those people are still very ignorant.

Actually, something interesting that I recently learned, is that the western Basque dialects (that have pitch-accent, while the eastern dialects have only stress) are quite similar to the Tokyo Japanese dialect.



All the Japanese words have the nominative participle "ga", while the Basque words have the absolutive suffix "-a" or "-ak" (singular and plural respectively). Although, while pitch-accent in Japanese is phonemic, in Basque it is mostly grammatical (except in a few dozen words that have stress on the first syllable instead of the second, like "kanpotar", because as you can see, the second and third examples are the same, except for the pitch-accent.

Pitch-accent changes slightly from dialect to dialect, and even in sub-dialects. Gernika is a sub-dialect of the Bizkaiera (of Biscay, the western-most province of the Basque Country). In standard Basque (Batua, which means "united") the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th examples would be "gizonenak", "gizonarenak", and "gizonarena" respectively, and in a dialect of Gipuzkoera (of Gipuzko, directly east of Biscay) both "gizonenak" and "gizonarenak" would both have the same pitch-accent, that of the third example, while "gizonarena" would have the pitch-accent of the second example.

For more examples of pitch-accent, you can check out the recordings of Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Serbian, and Swedish here: http://www.unilang.org/sonidos.php?res=464

Thus concludes today's lesson, children. I could talk for hours upon hours about linguistics.

That's cool!

Jocli stop making my head hurt.