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

At 6:17 pm -0400 3/10/00, Estelachan@AOL.COM wrote:
[....]
>about. Japanese is a nice example because there's no such thing as syllables
>(internally)....only moras. "mora" may actually be the Japanese term.

No - it's Latin.

It was used originally to describe the minimal unit of metrical time or
weight in ancient Greek and Classical Latin verse, where there is an
opposition between heavy (two-mora _or_ bimoraic) syllables and light
(one-mora _or_ monomoraic) syllables.   (Pre-classical and popular
post-Classical Latin verse was not moraic, but accentual as, e.g. in
English)

[...]
>not syllables.... if you've ever heard singing in Japanese, you'll hear each
>mora as a seperate syllable, including "n".
If this is so, then they are not morae.  It only makes sense to talk of
morae if one can have, in the language, syllables that are at least
bimoraic.

In fact, "n" can be a whole word.
>
>so the word "kanji" or "kanzi" (Japanese ideogram[s]) is three mora: ka-n-zi.
>the borrowed word for party, "paatii", is four mora: pa-a-ti-i.
>...even though they have only two *syllables* each.
Unless I've missed something, this contradicts what you said above.
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At 5:21 pm -0700 3/10/00, Marcus Smith wrote:
>Estelachan@AOL.COM wrote:
......
>>about. Japanese is a nice example because there's no such thing as syllables
>>(internally)....only moras.
>
>That's debatable.   As a matter of fact, I find it easier to discuss the
>distribution of consonants and vowels in terms of syllables than in morae.
Well, there caertainly seems to be a confusion between morae & syllables in
Estelachan's description.

[snip]
>
>And the word _chotto_ is also three morae: cho-t-to.
Quite so.

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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