Quote:
Originally Posted by oompa loompa
To be honest, I never bothered learning the pitch accents (because its pretty difficult to do), and have never needed to know them either. I was however, taught (told, and now read, on different occasions) that a structure to distinguish words with pitch accents exists within the language. Even if its not used that much, it is there as a legitimate, documented part of the language. I don't think its archaic either, the few people (IMPE living there as well) I talked to about this did tell me that this was the way you would differentiate between words.
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I am far from convinced... it sounds more like personal opinions in obsolete matters. Then again my interest in linguistics is amateurish, empirical, and statistical... those old men that make money out of it (pretending to have some deeper insight in the matter) probably should disagree
In any case, on my practical side, I was discussing the writings, pronunciations and uses of yasui(s) with a couple of friends from Kyuushuu and another from Kansai recently that enforced my current understanding, and crushed my hopes for the existence of some logic rule behind homophones in Japanese, or at least how Japanese are
normally used in order to be understood by the native speakers and not how complicated they can be made in order to promoted social stratification
