l8 PRONUNCIATION AND LETTER-CHANGES.
emphasis cause a word or syllable to be accented in a peculiarly declamatory manner, which foreigners find difficulty in imitating. The strength of the entire body seems to be concentrated on the production, on the laborious squeezing out, of the word in question.
N. B. The statement made in the above paragraph concerning the absence of accent in Japanese is intended rather for purposes of practical instruction than of scientific accuracy. There is a slight tonic accent in Japanese. But so extremely slight is it, that it has never been marked in any dictionary whether native or foreign, it has . no influence on prosody, it varies from province to province, and inhabitants of the same province contradict, not only each other, but themselves in their usage and in the explanations which they give concerning it. Most of the Tokyo people distinguish by a faint difference of stress such pairs of words as
iime, " rain ; " ame, " a kind of sweetmeat."
hashi, " chopsticks ; " hashi, " a bridge."
kaki, " an oyster ; " kaki, " a persimmon."
koto, " a sort of harp ;" koto, "a thing."
kiimo, " a spider ; " kunio, " a cloud."
take, " a mountain-peak ;" take, " a bamboo."
The difference between such words may be compared, not in kind, but in degree, with that made by some English speakers be- tween " morning" and " mourning," or between the verb " to advocate" and the substantive " an advocate." The interest of the question is rather for the theoretical than for the practical student. The tendency of Englishmen, and indeed of most Europeans excepting Frenchmen, is always to accentuate Japanese much too strongly. They cannot do better, at least for the first few years, than endeavour not to accen- tuate it at all.
LETTER-CHANGES.
IF 28. Nigori, i.e. " muddling," is the name given by the Japanese to the substitution of sonant consonants for
