Re: Morae (was: Re: Lurkers, poetic forms)

Raymond Brown wrote:
> IF the word is bisyllabic, THEN stress the first syllable,
> ELSE
>   IF the penultimate syllable is heavy, THEN stress it,
>   ELSE stress the antepenultimate (whatever its weight).
I've always thought that the first rule could be dropped.  If a word is
bisyllabic, then there IS no antepenultimate syllable, so the first rule
logically follows from the second.

> In linking Southern Paiute & Shoshoni _stress_ to syllabic weight, you are
> confirming my impression that morae have come to be used by most as units
> of *syllabic weight*
Well, in Japanese, morae are used to determine things like pitch (for
instance, the first two morae of a word cannot be the same pitch, and a
pitch-change can occur between morae), also, each mora generally takes
the same length of time to say.  Sometimes, the word "syllable" is used
instead of mora, but I think it's misleading to call something like
_nihon_ three syllables.

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