I recently boasted to a native speaker that I can pronounce Japanese with a high degree of precision, while he has trouble with pronouncing the "L" sound in English. Later in the discussion he stopped me and insisted that I was mistaking a Japanese pronunciation. He said:
'黒海{こっかい}’ is pronounced differently than '国会{こっかい}’
(1) I don't believe him. Is there really more than one way to pronounce "こっかい”, or any other word? Every word can be written in kana, and kana pronunciation is not ambiguous?
(2) Is it even possible for Japanese to have the concept of a heteronyms? A heteronym must be written the same way and pronounced differently. But, almost every Japanese word can be written two different ways: kana and kanji. Without a unique way to write a word, heteronyms don't make sense?
Is this a valid assertion: "The Japanese language does not support the concept of 'heteronyms'."?
maybe this page needs to be updated and improved? http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_heteronyms
thank you.
Answer
It's a matter of pitch accent. In a manner somewhat similar to Chinese, Japanese actually has 2 tones that establish its inflectional patterns. They aren't widely taught to foreigners because the patterns vary amongst regions (e.g. Osaka and Tokyo are near-opposite), but one purpose that they do serve is to distinguish between homophones.
According to the 1980 edition of the 明解日本語アクセント辞典 published by 三省堂, the proper inflectional patterns are as follows:
- 黒海 こっかい【HLLL】
- 国会 こっかい【LHHH】
So in the case of 黒海 you would start on a higher pitch and it would fall after the first; in the case of 国会 it starts low and then rises.
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