Re: Phoneme winnowing continues
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, June 4, 2003, 9:42 |
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En réponse à Mark J. Reed :
>Just to make sure I have this right:
>
>"Uchyuu Senkan Yamato" has seven syllables (U/chyuu/sen/kan/ya/ma/to)
>and ten morae (U/chyu/u/se/n/ka/n/ya/ma/to).
Indeed.
>Does this imply that the kana are not true syllabaries but actually
>"moraries"? I mean, the Hiragana transcription of the above
>has ten symbols, not seven.
Exactly! The kana do follow the moraic structure of Japanese texts very
closely, rather than the syllabic structure. I suppose it's because
everything else in Japanese is mora-based rather than syllable-based:
pitch-accent position, poetry (haiku must have 17 morae), singing (I always
have difficulties singing Japanese songs since I forget that the final 'n'
always takes its own foot), etc... It only makes sense then if you go to a
syllabic script to mark each mora with a single character, since the
syllable itself doesn't have much of an existence in Japanese (it's only a
"physical" property of normal connected speech, which truly pronounces long
vowels as long vowels and final nasals as ends of syllable).
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
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