''On'' (音; rarely ''onji'') are the phonetic units in Japanese poetry. In the Japanese language, the word means "sound". It includes the phonetic units counted in

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 ...

tanka is a genre of classical Japanese poetry and one of the major genres of Japanese literature. Etymology Originally, in the time of the '' Man'yōshū'' (latter half of the eighth century AD), the term ''tanka'' was used to distinguish "short ...

, and other such poetic forms. Known as " morae" to English-speaking linguists, the modern Japanese term for the linguistic concept is either ''haku'' ( 拍) or ''mōra'' ( モーラ). Ji (字) is Japanese for "symbol" or "character". The concatenation of the two words ''on'' and ''ji'' into ''onji'' (音字) was used by

Meiji era The is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization ...

grammarians to mean "phonic character" and was translated into English by Nishi Amane in 1870 as "letter". Since then, the term "onji" has become obsolete in Japan, and only survives in foreign-language discussion of

Japanese poetry Japanese poetry is poetry typical of Japan, or written, spoken, or chanted in the Japanese language, which includes Old Japanese, Early Middle Japanese, Late Middle Japanese, and Modern Japanese, as well as poetry in Japan which was written in th ...

. Gilbert and Yoneoka call the use of the word ''"onji"'' "bizarre and mistaken". It was taken up after a 1978 letter to ''Frogpond: Journal of the Haiku Society of America'' decrying the then-current use of the word "jion", which itself appears to have arisen in error.Richard Gilbert
Stalking the Wild Onji
/ref> Counting ''on'' in Japanese poetry is the same as counting characters when the text is transliterated into

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 contras ...

. In cases where a hiragana is represented by a pair of symbols each pair (or "digraph" e.g. "kyo" (きょ)) equates to a single ''on''. When viewed this way, the term "''ji''" ("character") is used in Japanese. In English-language discussions of Japanese poetry, the more familiar word "

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...

" is sometimes used. Although the use of "syllable" is inaccurate, it sometimes happens that the syllable count and the ''on'' count match in Japanese-language haiku. The disjunction between syllables and ''on'' becomes clearer when counting sounds in English-language versions of Japanese poetic forms, such as haiku in English. An English syllable may contain one, two or three morae and, because English word sounds are not readily representable in hiragana, a single syllable may require many more ''ji'' to be transliterated into hiragana. There is disagreement among linguists as to the definitions of "syllable" and "mora".Ellen Broselaw, ''Skeletal Positions and Moras'', in John A Goldsmith (ed.), ''The Handbook of Phonological Theory''. Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, , p175ff In contrast, ''ji'' (and hence ''on'') is unambiguously defined by reference to hiragana.

Examples

To illustrate the distinction between ''on'' and syllables, the first four of the following words each contain the same number of ''on'', but different numbers of syllables, and the fifth shows a variant of the fourth with one less ''on'' but the same number of syllables: The examples show the various ways in which hiragana differ from syllables. In ''Nagasaki'' each hiragana character represents a single on, and hence the four hiragana are also four syllables. In ''Ōsaka'', the initial O is a long (doubled) vowel (denoted with a macron over the vowel in rōmaji), and hence counts as two ''on''. ''Tōkyō'' includes two long vowels, which contribute two ''on'' each in Japanese but only one syllable each, which does not distinguish long vowels from short. In ''Nippon'' the doubled "P" each is pronounced separately; the final "N" is also a separate hiragana, so the two English syllables translate to four ''on''.

References

{{Japanese poetry Phonetics Japanese poetry Japanese literary terminology