See the difference between Japanese syllable and Japanese mora

See the difference between Japanese syllable and Japanese mora When you study in the best institute for Japanese language in Delhi NCR, you know that most treatments of Japanese phonology fail to distinguish between syllable and mora. The mora concept arises in languages which make a distinction between long and short syllables, e.g. Japanese, Classical Latin, Classical Greek. A mora is a rhythmical unit of which short syllables have one and long syllables have two. The extra mora in long syllables is due to the presence of an offset segment. Thus in Japanese /a/, /ka/, /kya/ are short syllables and /aa/, /kaa/, /kyaa/, /kyan/ are long syllables. McCawley (1968), using terminology from Troubetskoy, has dubbed Japanese a 'mora counting syllable language,' by which he means that the syllable is the prosodic unit or bearer of pitch accent (i.e. there is no distinction between syllables accented on the first mora and syllables accented on the second mora), and the mora is the unit of phonological distance (i.e. accent rules are of the type 'place the accent on the antepenultimate moral). The example McCawley uses to show that both the syllable and the mora are necessary is the loan word /erebeetaa/ 'elevator' which in accordance with the above rule of accentuation of Japanese would be accented /erebeĂŠtaa/, but which in fact is accented /erebĂŠetaa/ because long syllables are never accented on the second mora. The rule then must be worded 'place the accent on the syllable containing the antepenultimate mora.

There is other evidence that Japanese is a 'syllable language.' Ashworth and Lincoln (1973) cite verb stems derived from borrowed words which are shortened forms of the originals to which a native inflectional suffix is attached, e.g. /a.dzi.tee.syon/ /adzir-/ /adziru/ 'to agitate'; /de.mon.su.to.ree.syon/ /demor-/ /demoru/ 'to demonstrate'; /haa.mo.nai.dzu/ /hamor-/ /hamoru/ 'to harmonize'; and /da.ben/(1) /daber-/ /daberu/ 'to chat idly' . To state the rule for deriving the verb stem from the original in 2, 3, and 4 it will be necessary to recognize not only the syllable but the difference between long and short syllables since the stem apparently must begin with two short syllables followed by /r/ even if the syllables in question were originally long. Thus the verb stem is formed on the first two syllables (not moras) of the original minus any offset segments.

It is usually claimed that in Japanese, the moras in an utterance are of more or less equal duration, but spectrographic evidence shows that on the contrary the duration of moras differs widely depending on segmental constituency and other factors. Native speakers are aware of the number of moras in an utterance (or a line of poetry) and it is apparently length based on this quantity that they respond to rather than length measured in centiseconds. To the extent that the latter plays a role it is in the intention and perception of speech rather than its actuation.