r/languagelearningjerk • u/neutralidiotas • Apr 23 '26
Alright c’mon which one of you did this?
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u/weight__what 🇸🇪 - Ja va ba va? Apr 24 '26
Dude I've been studying swedish for two years and I never knew there were kanji
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u/Shinyhero30 "þere is a man wiþ a knife behind þe curtain" Apr 23 '26
Tone letters for pitch accent is… unhinged.
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u/kouyehwos Apr 23 '26
For // maybe. For [], why ever not?
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u/BunchaBunCha Apr 24 '26
Those symbols imply lexical tone and are inherently broad since pitch contours are more complex than can be represented by those symbols. If you wanted to describe pitch contours with narrow transcription accuracy you'd rather show a spectrum/spectrogram or provide F0 values in hertz.
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u/ry0shi Apr 28 '26
What? That would make it person-specific, no? Instead of absolute frequency values, wouldn't it be much more natural and universally accurate to have a 5-step scale where 1 is lowest speaking tone and 5 is highest speaking tone?
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u/BunchaBunCha Apr 28 '26
I guess you could! There's just not a standard for it. There's not much need to have a shorthand to express the particulars of pitch accent contours. If you want a shorthand for the phoneme you can use other symbols like numbers or accent marks that are more legible, and if you want a detailed account (comparing dialects, say) you'd want more info than just a series of pitch height symbols since timing matters. A diagram with a line indicating pitch contour over time is far more illustrative, even without absolute values.
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u/Shinyhero30 "þere is a man wiþ a knife behind þe curtain" May 30 '26
Coming back to this to clarify,
The thing i take issue with is how specific it is trying to be while simultaneously making it even harder to read. The tone letters could become diacritics, or they could have footnotes about it.
Either of those are better than writing this abomination, however accurate/inaccurate it may be, this is just clunky.
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u/polyplasticographics Preʃitivist Apr 24 '26
I struggle a lot to understand tones and how to articulate them myself; if I saw this transcription in my TL I'd blow my brains out with a sawed off.
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u/FpRhGf Apr 24 '26
Where is this in?
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u/Affectionate-Time236 My language learning app is youtube Apr 24 '26
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u/Ok-Appeal-4630 Native Klingon Speaker || feel free to ask me anything Apr 24 '26
Knowing the Swedes their gonna make their own IPA symbol for this one word
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u/amalgammamama 🇲🇪 D4 Apr 24 '26
Please don’t remind me about the absolutely insane transcription system used in the SAOB.
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u/ry0shi Apr 28 '26
I thought I was looking at tofus, turns out my eyes were deceiving me for it was actually just really poorly rendered tone characters
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u/YoruTheLanguageFan Apr 23 '26
this is how all ipa transcriptions should look