jaPitchPlotter

A tool to produce SVGs of Japanese pitch accent patterns

About

This tool is designed to produce simple SVG images of Japanese pitch accent patterns. If you want to dig into the specifics about what they are, do like I do and learn from Dogen at Patreon.

The tool is designed to take in three strings describing a given word or phrase and the corresponding pitch accent patterns. The tool generally makes few assumptions about language, and relies upon you, the user to describe the pattern. It generally assumes that a small "y" kana (やゆよ) in either katakana or in hiragana is lumped with the prior kana, even if this doesn't make any sense. If you write るょ then the tool will quite happily keep going. Other than that it does assume that a small tsu (as in けっこう) is it's own mora.

The three strings are a key (or a name) for internal use. This can be a number if you want. Secondly the phonetics of the word or phrase in either katakana or hiragana, and finally a code representing the pitch accent of the phonetic phrase. Examples are given in the 'example_codes.txt' file in this repository separated by colons.

Examples

Note by default the examples assume you do not change the default option of dropping the final point indicating the difference between a heiban (平板) and odaka (尾高) word. This is easily overridden by using the named variable includeFinalOpen=True in the parseToneString call.

Phonetics	Code	Result
べんきょう	0/4	4 mora 平板
べんきょうになる	0/4,1/2	4 mora 平板 connected to particle and 2 mora 頭高
べんきょうになる	0/4,*1/2	disconnected line between particle and second word
きのうは	2/3	3 mora 中高 with marked particle
べんきょうして	0/4*,*0/2	disconnected line, no implied particle

In short rules are:

• <downstep location>/<length of word>
• commas separating groups
• trailing * to drop an implied particle
• leading * to remove a connecting line
• no whitespace tolerance (BUG!)

Misc

Example images are available in the examples directory. Color, font, spacing, padding, size, and plot styles are configurable. I personally use Inkscape to convert SVG to other formats when needed. A handy bash command to do this for is:

for SVG_FILE in examples/*.svg; do
    PNG_FILE="${SVG_FILE/.svg/.png}"
    inkscape --export-png="${PNG_FILE}" "${SVG_FILE}"
done

Send me your bugs (gently).

-Luke (@siriusfox)

Tofugu Examples

I did a small extension where I took the material from the Tofugu Pronunciation Article and wrote a simple parser to generate graphics showing the pattern rather than using their LH letter convention to show pitch. The examples are available in tofugu_examples and tofugu_files. [2018-05-23]