Is “Nippon” Four or Two?
— Mora and Syllable, Sorted Out for the Interpreter Exam

1. Why mora comes up in interpreter training

The National Unified Examination for Sign-Language Interpreters is run by the National Training Center for Sign-Language Interpreters (a social welfare corporation) together with the prefecture-level bodies that administer it. Its handbook sets out the scope of the Japanese-language part of the written paper (100 minutes) in seven items, and the first of them is “the way sounds are produced, the distinction between sounds, accent, and so on.” The remaining six cover vocabulary, grammar, writing and orthography, expression and honorifics, reading comprehension, and literary history.

Sound comes before vocabulary and grammar in that list. Mora is the foundation this item rests on: neither “the distinction between sounds” nor “accent” can be explained without it.

2. What a mora is

Start with the word itself. Daijisen defines a mora as a unit in prosody or phonology, the length of sound taken to correspond to one short syllable (via Kotobank). It began as a unit for measuring the length of Latin verse: one short syllable’s worth of time was one mora.

What makes the unit distinctive once it is applied to Japanese is that “n”, the small “tsu”, and the long-vowel mark each count as a mora on their own. Britannica International Encyclopaedia likewise singles out the moraic nasal, the geminate consonant and the long vowel — each forming a mora by itself — as a feature of Japanese. That is the heart of the Japanese mora, and all four of the stumbling points below come out of it.

In Japanese, each kana of the fifty-sound table counts as one unit, and with the long vowel, the geminate and the moraic nasal added, 103 morae are standardly counted (Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten).

3. How it differs from a syllable

Back to “Nippon”. Counted in morae it is four. Counted in syllables it is two.

A syllable is one lump of sound produced in a single breath. The moraic nasal, the geminate and the long vowel cannot start a sound on their own: each attaches to what comes before it and forms one lump with it. Counted in syllables, then, the word is “nip” and “pon” — two. A mora, on the other hand, is a beat of equal length, so the geminate and the nasal are each counted separately as occupying one beat’s worth of time.

Clap while saying “Nippon” and you can feel it. Four claps fit: ni-(t)-po-n. No sound comes out at the geminate, yet there is a full beat of space there. A native speaker claps those four without thinking about it, because the sense of mora is already in place.

4. The four places where counting goes wrong

A plain kana is one mora, and there is nothing to get wrong about it. Miscounting happens in exactly four places.

1. The moraic nasal ん — one mora

tenki (weather) is te-n-ki, three morae. The trap is attaching the ん to the kana before it and counting two.

2. The geminate っ — one mora

kippu (ticket) is ki-(t)-pu, three morae. No voice comes out there, but as length it occupies one full beat. Skipping it is the most common miscount of all.

3. The long vowel ー — one mora

kōhī (coffee) is ko-(long)-hi-(long), four morae. A lengthened sound counts as one too. The あ written in おかあさん and the う written in とうきょう work the same way.

4. The palatalised kana ゃゅょ — the one that runs the other way

Where the first three added a mora for every character present, this one subtracts. A small ゃ, ゅ or ょ forms a single mora together with the kana before it: two characters, one mora. shashin (photograph) is sha-shi-n, three morae, not four.

Which gives a two-step procedure. First, join every small ゃ, ゅ or ょ to the kana in front of it and treat the pair as one. Then count what is left, one character at a time. Those two steps handle the nasal, the geminate and the long vowel correctly as well.

5. Accent: the drop is counted in morae too

The first item of the exam scope also listed accent, and mora comes back into play there.

The NHK Japanese Pronunciation and Accent Dictionary, compiled by the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute and published in May 2016, moved away from writing out the sequence of highs and lows and adopted a notation that marks the point where the pitch drops, with a separate mark for words that have no drop at all. The Japan Foundation’s review of the dictionary describes the gain: once you know whether there is a drop and, if so, where it falls, even stretches longer than a single word can be explained by the simple principle that “where there is an accent, the pitch falls” (Japan Foundation, Japanese-Language Education Bulletin).

The ruler that measures where that drop falls is the mora, not the syllable. A word’s accent pattern is fixed by which mora the fall comes after. Drop a special mora from the count, or count a palatalised kana as two, and the position of the fall shifts wholesale. That is the sense in which counting morae underpins questions about accent.

6. What separates byōin from biyōin

The same first item of the exam scope also listed the distinction between sounds. Nowhere does that show up more sharply than in this pair.

Written in kana the two are びょういん and びよういん. The only difference is whether the よ is small or full-sized. A small ょ forms one mora with the び before it; a full-sized よ is a mora in its own right. That single point makes one word four morae long and the other five — words of different length.

This matters when an interpreter voices Japanese as well. Stretch the one mora of a palatalised kana as though it were two plain morae and a listener may well receive a different word. The reverse holds too. Mora is knowledge on paper, and at the same time it is the length of what comes out of your mouth.

7. Practice: count them

How many morae is each of these? The procedure was two steps: join the small ゃ, ゅ or ょ to the kana before it, then count what is left one character at a time. Do not forget that ん, っ and ー each count as one. For the last item, give the syllable count as well.

8. Summary

One last thing. The way I have organised this is one way of looking at it. Phonetics and Japanese-language teaching have finer distinctions and other ways of explaining the same ground. If you were taught differently, or you think a piece of this is off, I would be glad to hear it through the contact form (the article name is filled in for you).

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