Mora

[alcarilinque]

I understand the basics of what moras are, and so on, but is there any evidence that speakers of languages that are more mora-oriented actually have their own judgements on what mora are outside of mindless phonological operations that happen due to syllable weight? To me it makes sense that someone could have judgements about whether a syllable

Comments

[edricson]

I'm not sure about Finnish, but Greek and Latin authors clearly understood what light and heavy syllables were, as especially evidenced by versification.

[alcarilinque]

Oh, I'm not necessarily looking for Finnish... Just in general! Good to know though.

[nekokaze]

I'd like to offer something for Japanese, but I don't think you'll find much interesting there, the reason being that the mora is represented directly in the writing system. The way people manipulate words for emphasis, etc., and of course those "mindless" processes, clearly demonstrate that there morae are significant in the language. However, since people are taught to write in morae and taught to count them for poetry, I'm not sure how much you can get out of just asking someone that isn't regurgitated lessons on some level.

However, if you just want to learn about morae cross-linguistically, Japanese would be an excellent comparative case.

[alcarilinque]

Heh, hope the "mindless" didn't imply that they mean unintelligent, but they are something we can do with minimal effort.

I'd expected there'd be something about Japanese that would come up, as I had studied it for 4 years and remember something about mora, but that was before I'd really ever gotten into linguistics, so that's a good tidbit. With it being represented in the writin system, does that mean then that something like the nasal (however it's represented) is equal to any other character, i.e., , or are there sets of sounds in the "syllibaries" that have more morae than others?

[edricson]

Nope, the point is that syllables with long (=bimoraic) vowels are represented in hiragana as the relevant CV + V (e. g. ka-a, shi-i, no-u (the latter is orthographic convention)), which exactly represents moraicity (i. e. one character = one mora). Katakana is even cooler, in that long vowels are marked with a special character that functions as a length mark; in terms of modern phonology, it reads "additional mora with featural content spread from the left".

[nekokaze]

The system is even more impressively moraic than that (as you surely know, just for elaboration)-the first part of a long consonant (e.g. ッ) is moraic, as is the nasal (ン), and these have independent characters in the "syllabary".

The only points at which the system somewhat fails to adhere to "one symbol, one mora" are with the combinations like キャ, ショ, ティ, which though two characters in some sense are certainly single morae. Basically a way to make it neat is to call the ya-row small kana and the small vowels diacritics or some such. If you do so, all the others are moraic.

[zuzentzailea]

In English I don't intuitively feel morae, even after doing phonetics. As a native speaker I'm aware of short vowel, long vowel, and diphthong; I'm aware of some phonotactic restrictions like [N] only occurring after a short vowel (exception, the noises 'boing', 'oink'); but I can't feel that there is anything heavier about 'complaint', 'amount', 'chant' [tSa:nt], taunt. If I hadn't learnt about morae and extra-heaviness in phonetics classes, I wouldn't understand why no or so few words ended in [i:nt], [aump], [a:lt], [oilk] etc.

[alcarilinque]

Yeah. That's kind of what I'm curious about. In English, as you say, morae apparently do affect word formation to some extent, but we don't necessarily have a feel for it without training.

Thanks for pointing that out! I didn't know that about English, what with those extra-heavy rimes.