Re: mora
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, June 24, 2004, 18:23 |
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On Wednesday, June 23, 2004, at 11:00 , Tim May wrote:
> Emily Zilch wrote at 2004-06-23 14:07:24 (-0700)
>> i have a linguistic-technical question: i learned that the plural
>> of mora is 'mora' - that it is a native japanese word - when i was
>> learning japanese.
Not a native Japanese word. But, as others have said, it may well now be
used in Japanese. 'Tis a Latin word and if we can borrow it, there's no
reason why the Japanese can't :)
>> you could say 'moras' because that would be
>> normal english
It is indeed the normal English. I suspect the odd pedantic nitpicker here
and there insists on 'morae', but the normal English plural for the word,
when used a a linguistic term, is 'moras', i.e. we treat it as an English
word. So I guess that if the Japanese have borrowed the word, they
likewise treat as a Japanese word, i.e. no plural ending.
>> (though i'd be more likely, contrarian that i am, to
>> say meren or something similarly irregular - anyone know the cases
>> of earliest Middle English?).
You've lost me here.
>> wikipedia indicates discussion as follows:
>>
>> "Mora is a unit of sound used in phonology that determines stress
>> in some languages.
The quotes from Wikipedia I've seen on Conlang have not given me
confidence in using Wikipedia as a reference. Stress may be related to
moraic structure, but not necessarily so. But equally, pitch-accent may be
related. The term is traditionally used in the study of metrics and is
applicable to the 'rhyme' (i.e. syllabic nucleus and coda) and not to the
syllabic onset. The notion of mora counting is used to handle languages
where there is an opposition between _heavy_ (two-mora or 'bimoraic')
syllables and _light_ (one-mora or 'monomoraic') syllables as, e.g. in the
prosody of ancient Greece & Classical Latin.
>> Like many technical linguistics terms, the exact
>> definition of mora (plura moras or morae) is debated. The term,
>> meaning "delay," comes from Latin."
Yep - that's right. Apparently it was originally used to denote a pause or
break equivalent to a light syllable; it later came to be used simply to
refer to the metric time or weight of a light (monomoraic) syllable.
>> now i'm confused. i think this might be a mis-appropriation - what
>> might be termed a 'faux ami' or false cognate. can anyone
>> corroborate either the first use of MORA or the native japanese
>> meaning thereof?
Neither a 'faux ami' or mis-appropriation. Simply the borrowing of the
word with its later meaning of "metric time or weight of a light
(monomoraic) syllable".
>>
>
> I don't believe "mora" is a native Japanese word, although
> people learning Japanese often assume this (certainly I did).
>
> Evidence for this:
>
>
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/モーラ
>
> The _Japanese_ Wikipedia entry for mora a) spells the word in katakana,
> and b) says it's from Latin. (Note that in Japanese the first
> syllable is long).
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