An attempt at a family tree of Japanese dialect accentuation : As viewed from "class mergers" and "geographical distribution"

ORIGINAL PAPER徳川宗賢, 1962, 「“日本諸方言アクセントの系譜”試論 ―「類の統合」と「地理的分布」から見る―」, 『学習院大学国語国文学会誌』6, pp. 1-19.TOKUGAWA, Munemasa, 1962, “Nihongo sho-hōgen akusento-no keifu” shiron: “rui-no tōgō”-to “chiri-teki bumpu”-kara miru, Gakushūin Daigaku Kokugo Kokubungaku Kaishi 6, pp. 1-19.Translated by Wayne Lawrence (The University of Auckland)Proofed by Timothy J. Vance (Komatsu University

Modelling the Spatial Dynamics of Culture Spreading in the Presence of Cultural Strongholds

Cultural competition has throughout our history shaped and reshaped the geography of boundaries between humans. Language and culture are intimately connected and linguists often use distinctive keywords to quantify the dynamics of information spreading in societies harbouring strong culture centres. One prominent example, which is addressed here, is Kyoto's historical impact on Japanese culture. We construct a first minimal model, based on shared properties of linguistic maps, to address the interplay between information flow and geography. In particular, we show that spreading of information over Japan in the pre-modern time can be described as a Eden growth process, with noise levels corresponding to coherent spatial patches of sizes given by a single days walk, and with patch-to-patch communication time comparable to the time between human generations.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure