Re: Japanese question - Ii ?

 --- Rodlox <Rodlox@...> skrev:
>  a while back, in a book about Japanese history, I
> found an unusual (well, to me) name -
>
>  Ii
>
>  in Japanese, is that one sylable or two?
Japanese is not measured in syllables, but rather,
'morae' (singular, 'mora', comes from Latin, which
also worked in morae). From a syllabic perspective,
'Ii' is one syllable, but from a moraic standpoint,
it's two morae. In Japanese, a mora is composed of one
of these four things:

1. a short vowel ('a' is one mora)
2. a consonant plus a short vowel ('wa' is one mora)
3. the syllabic [n] (the word 'hanbun' has four morae,
divided as 'ha-n-bu-n')
4. the first element of a geminated consonant (the
word 'Nippon' is four morae, divided as 'Ni-p-po-n')

A consonant and long vowel takes up two morae: nyaa
is divided as 'nya-a'. Vowel clusters are counted
seperately; 'aoi' is three morae, divided as 'a-o-i'.