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

In a message dated 10/4/00 11:12:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM writes:

> I interpret this to mean that when Japanese is *sung*, the morae are
rendered
>  as full syllables, in the same sense that "Oh" is a single syllable in
> English,
>  but is sung as two in the first line of "The Star-Spangled Banner", viz.
>  "O-oh say can you see".  I know this is true of the first syllable of
"Shina
>  no yoru" (the Japanese version of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco", so
to
> speak).
yeah, exactly. sung Japanese is much more precise about saying all the
morae-- because the singing isn't so much about syllables, as it is about
beats/timing. In very careful speech, or singing, the word "shinjiteru" (to
believe in [a person]) is treated as "shi-n-ji-te-ru"... you hear the morae.
in normal speech, you hear it as "shin-ji-te-ru", the syllables instead. But
you always count morae in Japanese (internally, goodness knows how it's
treated in formal linguistics), never actual syallables. Sorry if my language
was less than precise, my Japanese teachers were more concerned with getting
across that you had to count morae than with the exact distinction between
mora and syllable, and my linguistics terminology is thin in general, so I
tend to babble semi-correctly when I know anything at all in hopes of Saying
Something Useful since my conlang is in the "sitting here tweaking it and
claiming I'll put it on the web soon" stage. gomen nasai! ("I'm sorry": 6
morae.)