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What is Japanese pitch accent?

Pitch accent is the Japanese phenomenon where each mora (see What is the difference between a mora and a syllable?) of a word can have either high or low pitch. In newsgroup discussions, these are represented by a string of letters H or L for high or low.

There are two basic patterns in standard Japanese, the "Tokyo dialect".^[1] The first is a flat pattern called heibanshiki (平板式) where a low mora is followed by high ones, LHHHH. For example,

muzukashii (difficult): LHHHH
arau (to wash): LHH

The second one is the rising and falling pattern, kifukushiki (起伏式). This has several types:

A low mora, followed by all high mora, and then the particle after the end of the word is low. This type only occurs for nouns. For example,followed by a low mora. This is called rising II type, odakagata (尾高型). For example,
- hana (wa) (flower) LH(L)
- otoko (ga) (man) LHH(L)
The first mora is low, then two or more high ones follow, then the pitch falls again. This is called rising and falling type, nakadakagata (中高型). For example,
- atsui (hot) LHL
- kudamono (fruit) LHLL
The first mora is high and the succeeding ones are all low. This is the falling type, atamadakagata (頭高型). For example,
- umi (sea) HL
- inochi (life) HLL

Some words with the same kana can be distinguished by different pitch accents. For example, hashi can be either hashi "chopsticks" or hashi, "bridge". Here is a table of words with identical kana yet different accents:

Word	Accent on first mora atamadakagata			Accent on second mora odakagata/nakadakagata			Flat heibanshiki
hashi	hashi	箸	chopsticks	hashi (ga)	橋	bridge	hashi (ga)	端	edge
ima	ima	今	now	ima (ga)	居間	living room
kaki	kaki	牡蠣	oyster	kaki (ga)	垣	fence	kaki (ga)	柿	persimmon
sake	sake	鮭	salmon				sake (ga)	酒	alcohol, sake
nihon	nihon	二本	two sticks of	nihon	日本	Japan

Phonetically speaking, the sense that a given mora occurs on one pitch and another mora on a different pitch, is by-and-large an illusion. Pitch makes contours over words and phrases, and there are no instantaneous rises or drops.

Phonemically speaking, probably all dialects (even those that don't have word accent at all) can probably be described in terms of two pitches, high and low. "Low", however, has two allophones--depending on where a low occurs, it may be more or less low (compared to a high or a low in another environment). This led linguists to a sandankan (三段観) "three step view/theory" of Tokyo-style accent.

The "LH" stuff that appears in sci.lang.japan so often is both potentially ambiguous and overkill. The best way to mark Tokyo-style accent would be with an accent mark on the vowel that precedes (actually, "begins") a drop in pitch. Accent marks in the newsgroup, however, turn to Japanese characters on many people's screens, so the next best thing is probably to put "|" after the last high vowel. (Note this does not work for Kyoto-style accent, which is, so-to-speak, two dimensional.)

References

Harusuke Kindaiichi, Meikai Akusento Jiten, page 12.; 1981

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