Elisabeth M. de Boer’s monograph on the suprasegmental phonology of Japanese (2010) broke new ground in many ways. It showed that Japanese is better described as a restricted tone language than as a pitch-accent language; demonstrated the superiority of S. Robert Ramsey’s interpretation of Middle Japanese tone-dot materials (such as Ruiju myōgishō) and the inconsistencies of the usual Japanese interpretation (teisetsu); established a clear tree-structure of dialect divergence from proto-Japanese to present-day dialects on the basis of the tone classes of nouns and verbs; and accounted for the occurrence of dialects with Tōkyō-type tone classes and rules in geographically disjoint parts of Japan.
Sadly, de Boer died in August 2023 at the age of 57, cutting short a promising career as a researcher and author. The Excel file presented here is the last version of her extensive fieldwork on the tones of Japanese nouns, verbs, and their compounds in a wide range of dialects.
The file contains four spreadsheets:
- Main Markings
- Martin corrected
- H+O big list
- H+O wide list
“Martin” is a listing of all the data in Martin 1987; “H+O” (formatted two ways) refers to the data in Hiroto & Takamichi 1953. “Main markings” includes data collected during the project funded by the European Research Council on which de Boer was working when she entered hospice care.
References
de Boer, Elisabeth M. 2010. The historical development of Japanese tone: Part 1 From proto-Japanese to the modern dialects; Part 2 The introduction and adaptation of the Middle Chinese tones in Japan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Hiroto, Atsushi, and Ōhara, Takamichi. 1953. San’in chihō no akusento [The accent of the San’in region]. Matsue: Hōkō-sha.
Martin, Samuel E. 1987. The Japanese language through time, New Haven; London: Yale University Press.
Database
de Boer database