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scot47

Joined: 10 Jan 2003 Posts: 15343
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MotherF
Joined: 07 Jun 2010 Posts: 1450 Location: 17�48'N 97�46'W
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Posted: Wed May 06, 2015 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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You've never studied a language in which its significant?
Japanese and just a couple of others... |
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scot47

Joined: 10 Jan 2003 Posts: 15343
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Posted: Wed May 06, 2015 4:25 pm Post subject: |
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French, German, Latin, Arabic, Bulgarian
none of this weird MORA stuff !
Next time round I will do Sanskrit - and Turkish. I am done with learning languages now and will stick with what I have. |
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MotherF
Joined: 07 Jun 2010 Posts: 1450 Location: 17�48'N 97�46'W
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Posted: Wed May 06, 2015 4:32 pm Post subject: |
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scot47 wrote: |
French, German, Latin, Arabic, Bulgarian
none of this weird MORA stuff !
Next time round I will do Sanskrit - and Turkish. I am done with learning languages now and will stick with what I have. |
An English language textbook on pronunciation will never have more than a line about mora mentioning it in passing while talking about stress timing.. I think English crams so many phonemes into an unstressed syllable that no one has ever successfully identified the mora of English, not that there is even any need to do so.
The most significant one in Japanese is the stand alone n. Clearly not a syllable, so what is it? It's a mora.  |
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nomad soul

Joined: 31 Jan 2010 Posts: 11454 Location: The real world
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fluffyhamster
Joined: 13 Mar 2005 Posts: 3292 Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
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Posted: Wed May 06, 2015 6:54 pm Post subject: |
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MotherF wrote: |
The most significant one in Japanese is the stand alone n. Clearly not a syllable, so what is it? It's a mora.  |
That was what I was thinking and was about to put (though I'd need to have a think about other examples of mora - geminate/doubled consonants and elongated vowels perhaps, both as in 学校/がっこう/gakkou, 'school'?). Mind you, Chinese has a similar stand-alone syllabic consonants at least, but I suppose those don't get quite the same "weighting" as they do in Japanese when coming at the end of (which in Japanese can also be kind of "in between") more complex syllables. For example, 新聞 shinbun (newspaper) is kind of shi-n-bu-n (in hiragana that would be しんぶん, 4 units/syllables/mora, and you'll certainly hear all 4 of them if e.g. a Japanese teacher imagines you're a bit thick and is speaking v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y f-o-r y-o-u), while in Chinese the same or similar characters 新聞/新闻 (which in Chinese means rather the news on the TV or radio) are pronounced shin wen (with the n more incorporated into each whole syllable). At least, that's my not-too-technical take on it!
Last edited by fluffyhamster on Wed May 06, 2015 10:11 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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scot47

Joined: 10 Jan 2003 Posts: 15343
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Posted: Wed May 06, 2015 8:01 pm Post subject: |
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All this makes the Ablative Absolute seem child's play ! |
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