A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a basic
timing unit in the
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a
syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ''ba'' consists of one mora (''monomoraic''), while a long syllable such as ''baa'' consists of two (''bimoraic''); extra-long syllables with three moras (''trimoraic'') are relatively rare. Such metrics are also referred to as
syllable weight.
The term comes from the
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
word for "linger, delay", which was also used to translate the Greek word χρόνος : ''chrónos'' (time) in its
metrical sense.
Formation
The general principles for assigning moras to segments are as follows (see
Hayes 1989 and
Hyman Surname
Hyman is the surname of:
* Alan Hyman (1910–1999), author and screenwriter
* Alexander C. Hyman (Born 1993), American Businessman
* Albert Hyman (1893–1972), co-inventor of the artificial pacemaker
* Anthony Hyman (disambiguation), s ...
1985 for detailed discussion):
# A
syllable onset (the first
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...
or consonants of the syllable) does not represent any mora.
# The
syllable nucleus represents one mora in the case of a short vowel, and two morae in the case of a long vowel or
diphthong. Consonants serving as syllable nuclei also represent one mora if short and two if long.
Slovak is an example of a language that has both long and short consonantal nuclei.
# In some languages (for example,
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
and
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
), the
coda represents one mora, and in others (for example,
Irish
Irish may refer to:
Common meanings
* Someone or something of, from, or related to:
** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe
***Éire, Irish language name for the isle
** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
) it does not. In
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
, the codas of stressed syllables represent a mora (thus, the word ''cat'' is bimoraic), but for unstressed syllables it is not clear whether this is true (the second syllable of the word ''rabbit'' might be monomoraic).
# In some languages, a syllable with a long vowel or diphthong in the nucleus and one or more consonants in the coda is said to be trimoraic (see
pluti
Vedic Sanskrit was an ancient language of the Indo-Aryan subgroup of the Indo-European language family. It is attested in the Vedas and related literature compiled over the period of the mid-2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE. It was orally preser ...
).
In general, monomoraic syllables are called "light syllables", bimoraic syllables are called "heavy syllables", and trimoraic syllables (in languages that have them) are called "superheavy syllables". Some languages, such as
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...
and present-day English, can have syllables with up to four morae.
A
prosodic
In linguistics, prosody () is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, st ...
stress system in which moraically heavy syllables are assigned stress is said to have the property of quantity sensitivity.
Languages
Ancient Greek
For the purpose of determining accent in
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
, short vowels have one mora, and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae. Thus long ''ē'' (
eta
Eta (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἦτα ''ē̂ta'' or ell, ήτα ''ita'' ) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the close front unrounded vowel . Originally denoting the voiceless glottal fricative in most dialects, ...
: ) can be understood as a sequence of two short vowels: ''ee''.
Ancient Greek pitch accent is placed on only one mora in a word. An
acute
Acute may refer to:
Science and technology
* Acute angle
** Acute triangle
** Acute, a leaf shape in the glossary of leaf morphology
* Acute (medicine), a disease that it is of short duration and of recent onset.
** Acute toxicity, the adverse eff ...
(, ) represents high pitch on the only mora of a short vowel or the last mora of a long vowel (''é'', ''eé''). A
circumflex () represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel (''ée'').
English
In Old English, short diphthongs and monophthongs were monomoraic, long diphthongs and monophthongs were bimoraic, consonants ending a syllable were each one mora, and
geminate
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
consonants added a mora to the preceding syllable. In Modern English, the rules are similar, except that all diphthongs are bimoraic. In English, and probably also in Old English, syllables cannot have more than four morae, with loss of sounds occurring if a syllable would have more than 4 otherwise. From the Old English period through to today, all
content word Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate acti ...
s must be at least two morae long.
Gilbertese
Gilbertese
Gilbertese or taetae ni Kiribati, also Kiribati (sometimes ''Kiribatese''), is an Austronesian language spoken mainly in Kiribati. It belongs to the Micronesian branch of the Oceanic languages.
The word ''Kiribati'', the current name of the i ...
, an Austronesian language spoken mainly in
Kiribati
Kiribati (), officially the Republic of Kiribati ( gil, ibaberikiKiribati),[Kiribati]
''The Wor ...
, is a trimoraic language. The typical
foot in Gilbertese contains three morae. These trimoraic constituents are units of stress in Gilbertese. These "ternary metrical constituents of the sort found in Gilbertese are quite rare cross-linguistically, and as far as we know, Gilbertese is the only language in the world reported to have a ternary constraint on prosodic word size."
Hawaiian
In
Hawaiian, both syllables and morae are important. Stress falls on the penultimate mora, though in words long enough to have two stresses, only the final stress is predictable. However, although a
diphthong, such as ''oi,'' consists of two morae, stress may fall only on the first, a restriction not found with other vowel sequences such as ''io.'' That is, there is a distinction between ''oi,'' a bimoraic syllable, and ''io,'' which is two syllables.
Japanese
Most dialects of
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
, including the standard, use morae, known in Japanese as ''haku'' () or ''mōra'' (), rather than syllables, as the basis of the sound system. Writing Japanese in
kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...
(
hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''.
It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...
and
katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...
) is said by those scholars who use the term ''mora'' to demonstrate a moraic system of writing. For example, in the two-syllable word ''mōra'', the ''ō'' is a long
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, , corresponding here to ''mo-o-ra'', each containing one mora. Therefore, scholars argue that the 5/7/5 pattern of the ''
haiku
is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or s ...
'' in modern Japanese is of morae rather than syllables.
The Japanese syllable-final ''n'' is also said to be moraic, as is the first part of a geminate consonant. For example, the Japanese name for "
Japan", , has two different pronunciations, one with three morae (''Nihon'') and one with four (''Nippon''). In the hiragana spelling, the three morae of ''Ni-ho-n'' are represented by three characters (), and the four morae of ''Ni-p-po-n'' need four characters to be written out as .
Similarly, the names ''
Tōkyō
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...
'' (''To-u-kyo-u'', ), ''
Ōsaka
is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of 2.7 ...
'' (''O-o-sa-ka'', ), and ''
Nagasaki
is the capital and the largest Cities of Japan, city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan.
It became the sole Nanban trade, port used for trade with the Portuguese and Dutch during the 16th through 19th centuries. The Hi ...
'' (''Na-ga-sa-ki'', ) all have four morae, even though, on this analysis, they can be said to have two, three and four syllables, respectively. The number of morae in a word is not always equal to the number of
grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.
The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemi ...
s when written in kana; for example, even though it has four morae, the Japanese name for ''Tōkyō'' () is written with five graphemes, because one of these graphemes () represents a ''
yōon
The , also written as ''yōon'', is a feature of the Japanese language in which a mora is formed with an added sound, i.e., palatalized, or (more rarely in the modern language) with an added sound, i.e. labialized.
''Yōon'' are represented i ...
'', a feature of the Japanese writing system that indicates that the preceding consonant is
palatalized.
The "Contracted sound" (拗音) is represented by the three small kana for "ya" (ゃ), "yu" (ゅ), "yo" (ょ), these do not represent a mora by themselves and attach to other kana, all the rest of the graphemes represent a ''mōra'' in their own''.''
There is a unique set of ''mōra'' known as "special mora" (特殊拍) which can't be pronounced by itself but still count as one mora whenever present, these consist of "nasal sound" (撥音) represented by the kana for "n" (ん), the "geminate consonant" (促音) represented by the small tsu (っ), the "long sound" (長音) represented by the long vowel symbol (ー) or a single vowel which extends the sound of the previous ''mōra'' (びょ「う」いん) and the "diphthong" (二重母音) represented by the second vowel of two consecutive vowels (ばあ「い」).
This set also has the peculiarity that the drop in pitch of a word (so called "downstep") can not fall on any of these "special mora" under any conditions, which is especially useful for learners of the language trying to learn the accent of words.
The above rule doesn't apply to ん (the nasal N) which for the Japanese doesn't qualify as special and the drop in pitch can fall on ん, for example in the word 日本 (にほん/nihon), where に starts low, the pitch raises and peaks at ほ, then drops at ん and continues low through the following particle if it is present.
Luganda
In
Luganda, a
short vowel constitutes one mora while a
long vowel constitutes two morae. A simple
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...
has no morae, and a
doubled or
prenasalised consonant
Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather ...
has one. No
syllable may contain more than three morae. The tone system in Luganda is based on morae. See
Luganda tones Luganda, the language spoken by the Baganda people from Central Uganda, is a tonal language of the Bantu family. It is traditionally described as having three tones: high ('), low (') and falling ('). Rising tones are not found in Luganda, even on ...
and
Luganda grammar.
Sanskrit
In
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
, the mora is expressed as the ''mātrā''.
For example, the short vowel ''a'' (pronounced like a
schwa) is assigned a value of one ''mātrā'', the long vowel ''ā'' is assigned a value of two ''mātrā''s, and the compound vowel (diphthong) ''ai'' (which has either two simple short vowels, ''a''+''i'', or one long and one short vowel, ''ā''+''i'') is assigned a value of two ''mātrā''s. In addition, there is ''plutham'' (trimoraic) and ''dīrgha plutham'' ("long ''plutham''" = quadrimoraic).
Sanskrit prosody and metrics have a deep history of taking into account moraic weight, as it were, rather than straight syllables, divided into ''laghu'' (, "light") and ''dīrgha''/''guru'' (/, "heavy") feet based on how many morae can be isolated in each word. Thus, for example, the word ''kartṛ'' (), meaning "agent" or "doer", does not contain simply two syllabic units, but contains rather, in order, a ''dīrgha''/''guru''
foot and a ''laghu'' foot. The reason is that the conjoined
consonants
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...
''rt'' render the normally light ''ka''
syllable heavy.
See also
*
Chroneme
In linguistics, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant. The noun ''chroneme'' is derived , and the suffixed ''-eme'', which is analogous to the ''-eme'' in ''phoneme'' ...
*
Compensatory lengthening
Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered b ...
*
Dreimorengesetz
*
On (Japanese prosody)
*
Pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...
*
Syllable
Notes
References
*
*
*
LCCN
External links
*
{{Authority control
Phonology
Psycholinguistics