Clear All Your Confusion Between The Syllable And The Mora In Japanese

When you get an opportunity to Japanese language learning, clear all your doubts in regard to this foreign language. For example, the confusion between the syllable and the mora in Japanese may derive to some extent from the 'syllabic' kana orthography with which the language is written. At its inception the kana orthography was, indeed, syllabic since there was apparently no distinction between long and short syllables in Old Japanese (OJ). Subsequent developments introduced such a distinction however, and today the kana orthography would be better termed 'moraic.'

In her study of the natural phonology of vowels, Donegan (1978) distinguishes three basic identifying vowel features, palatality, labiality, and sonority. A cover term for the features palatality and labiality is colour (timbre), and vowels with the palatal and/or labial feature are, chromatic vowels. The relationship between colour and sonority is such that vowels with a high degree of one will have a low degree of the other.Donegan also proposes a number of universal context free processes which account for the commonly occurring vowel substitutions in natural languages. For example, raising tends to apply to chromatic vowels, especially lower ones, while lowering tends to apply to achromatic vowels, especially higher ones. Bleaching is more likely to apply to lower chromatic vowels. Colouring tends to apply to higher achromatic vowels. A characteristic of any process is that the application of its sub processes reflects a strict implicational hierarchy such that for instance colouring never applies to a lower achromatic unless it applies to higher ones (e.g. ʌ → e implies ɨ → i), or Lowering never applies to a mid-achromatic vowel unless it applies to a high one as well (e.g. ʌ → a implies ɨ → ʌ). Since context-free processes in NP act in the manner of morpheme structure rules in generative phonology the hierarchical conditions on the application of processes governing the lexicon account for the fact that certain vowels (e.g. /ɨ, æ ,ɔ/) are frequently absent from underlying inventories.

Japanese has five lexical vowels: [+ PAL] [- PAL]; [- LAB] [+ LAB]; [+ HIGH] i u; [- HIGH]; [- LOW] e o; and [+ LOW] a. From the absence of low chromatic vowels we can infer that raising or bleaching govern the lexicon. Likewise, the absence of the less sonorous achromatics implies that lowering or colouring also governs the lexicon. There is diachronic evidence for the raising of (long) low chromatic vowels. OJ [au̯] underwent monophthongization to [ɔɔ̯] (Nishihara 1970). We can assume [ai̯] > [ææ̯] as well since this latter remains in certain dialects (e.g. Hiroshima prefecture according to Itoo (1979)), but in the standard language these monophthongs were raised to [oo̯] and [ee̯] respectively