Re: THEORY: final features, moras, and roots [was: it's what I do]

At 1:25 am -0600 5/10/00, dirk elzinga wrote:
>On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Raymond Brown wrote:
[...]
>> Yes - and I'm merely an amateur linguist.  Can any of the professional
>> linguists on this list make the waters clearer?
>
>I seem to remember having this conversation before :-). Okay, here's
>the poop from a phonologist working within the Generative tradition
>(that would be me). A mora is a unit of syllable weight. Long vowels
[...etc snipped]

Yep - that accords exactly with what I have always understood also.


>Pitch accent systems, such as found in Japanese and (presumably)
>Ancient Greek, may follow different rules. Using the term 'mora' to
>describe such systems may therefore be confusing to linguists such as
>myself who know the term as applied to stress systems, regardless of
>the weight of tradition supporting such usage. It's just our poor luck
>that we didn't get a good Classical education.
But I _did_ get a good classical education  :)

And my understanding of morae is the same as yours, namely a unit of
syllable weight.  Furthermore, although ancient Greek unquestionably had
pitch accent, morae are used in exactly the same way as in Latin as far as
verse prosody is concerned: it is a unit of syllable weight in exactly the
same way.

It probably also had a Weight-to-Stress function in ancient Greek, tho this
is more controversial.  I doubt very much that stress was a 'word' function
but think rather it was like to be a phrasal phenomenon; it would, in any
case, have been lighter than the Latin stress since it was not accounted as
_the_ accent of the word and formed no part in the later development of
stress accent in modern Greek.  But the verse rhythms of ancient Greek must
surely have derived from formalizations of patterns found in speech.

The pitch accent worked differently and was dependent solely upon vowel
length, _not_ on syllabic quantity; i.e. it was dependent solely upon the
syllabic nucleus and not upon the rhyme (nucleus + coda).

Now, it am reminded that I have seen ancient Greek pitch accent described
in terms of 'morae' where a short vowel is one mora and a long vowel or
diphthong are two morae.  But this IMHO confuses the issue unless one
clearly distinguishes between two different sorts of morae: those that
determine verse rhythm & those those that condition the possible placings
of the pitch accent.

It might also be noted that the two different "morae" do not AFAIK work the
same in determining accent.  Where the word accent is one of stress in all
the WtS languages I know of, the 'syllabic morae' (or 'rhymic morae')
actually determine the placing of the stress.  In ancient Greek, the
vocalic (or nuclear) 'morae' do not do this. The pitch accent may fall upon
any one of final three such 'morae'.

IMHO the double use of morae is confusing and my traditional understanding
has been the same as Dirks, i.e. a unit of syllablic weight.

>For me, the debate over whether Japanese is "moraic" or "syllabic" is
>a non-issue; Japanese is clearly divided into syllables, and is just
>as clearly sensitive to the weight of those syllables.
Agreed.

>The issue for
>me in Japanese is a representational one: is the onset of a Japanese
>syllable adjoined to the first mora, or is it adjoined to the syllable
>directly? Thus for the final syllable of the word _hatten_ the debate
>is over the following representations (best viewed in a monowidth
>font):
>
>          s       s         syllable
>          |\     /|\
>          m m   / m m       mora
>         /| |   | | |
>        t e n   t e n       segment
Yes - but you are taking _ten_ as a _single_ bimoraic syllable.  That I can
understand and is in accord with its use in Latin & Greek prosody.

What I found (and find) a problem with is the view which seemed to be given
that _te-n_ formed _both_ two morae _and_ two syllables.

>I agree with linguists who argue for the former,
The latter accords with what I've understood of Latin and Greek (prosodic)
morae; but whether one takes /t/ as the onset of the first mora or as the
onset of the syllable as a whole does not seem to me to change the fact
that _ten_ is a single bimoraic syllable.

[...]
>
>As Nik has already noted, the pitch accent system is sensitive to
>syllable boundaries; hence syllables must also be recognized as
>prosodic units in Japanese.
i.e. they may be monomoraic or bimoraic, right?

>Comments/corrections welcome.
My comments are: thanks, it confirms what I understood by morae  :)

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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