Language Learners' Library

Your post equating syllables and morae is misleading to other people who don’t know Japanese, though :<

But so is your post talking about syllables in Japanese :confused:

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No, it’s not. There really are seven syllables in jaarimasendeshida. It’s just that some of them have multiple morae.

6 actually, deshida, despite being 3 morae, is only 2 syllables… not that japanese considers syllables as a thing

Fair distinction on deshida. How are they pronouncing that then? And again, just because Japanese doesn’t acknowledge “syllables” (even though ofc they are pronouncing syllables) doesn’t mean that syllables are morae. That is simply incorrect.

It also really gets into the way of what the thing actually means: seeing “Jaa” as a single syllable will blur that the “ja” and the “a” are parts of two different words. It’s like breaking up “I’m a man” into “I-ma-man”.

And I agree that syllables aren’t morae, that’s why I put it between apostrophes earlier.

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That syllables aren’t morae was all I was ever saying though :stuck_out_tongue:

@Vsotvep I think we just had a failure of communication ^^ I saw your initial reply as equating syllables and morae at a technical level, but actually I can see now that what you were saying was that morae take the cultural place of syllables in Japanese language study (and in the workings of Japanese grammar.)

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I think we agree :slight_smile:

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pron: ja-ari-ma-sen-de-sh,da (they get away with mushing the end by just barely but not really pronouncing the i between sh and da)

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Reminds of when I watched Michael Redmond and realised my rigidly defined ko-su-mit-su-ke was actually the sloshy “komitzgey” :stuck_out_tongue:

Oh btw, ja-ari? So there is a glottal stop?

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yeah it’s like when you realise in english you only pronounce the first letter of the word queue and the last 4 are silent lol

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no… all of them are squished together none of those hyphens are actual stops lol more of a sway in the mouth :stuck_out_tongue: you could kinda call all of jaari one syllable too if you wanted

it depends how fast you’re saying the word as to how much distinction each morae gets

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TA, not da

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGZwOFVsETc&feature=youtu.be&t=25

This is like that bit in learning Aztec where you try to pronounce the little l at the end that isn’t really a proper l, lol

Also: interesting parallel, in Sumerian cuneiform there were characters for both “forward” and “reversed” syllables. So lugal (king) could be spelt lu-ga-al (although in reality you would use an ideogram).

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There are a few things wrong with this translation, and I checked it with my girlfriend, since I wasn’t too sure about everything either.

Word choice

When I told this sentence to my girlfriend, she asked where Kooshi was. In other words, I don’t think that 港市 is used often. Instead, 町 is the way to denote an arbitrary city.

向かう does not mean to sail, it means to go somewhere, hence without clarification, the sentence could equally well mean that you go there by horse, on foot, or whatever means of travel. Instead, you should say 航海で向かう to mean sailing. (航海 / こうかい = sailing, で = particle, in this case to express the means of doing something)

Grammar

Including 私たちは in the sentence is a common mistake made by people who speak a language in which it is usual to include the subject. In Japanese this is not the case, and actually personal pronouns are usually only included in the sentence as emphasis. In this case, including 私たち will make it sound like you are contrasting “we are sailing to the city” with “they are sailing to the city”; it becomes more like an answer to the question “who are sailing to the city?” than to the question “what are we doing?”

The -て form is very difficult to capture adequately in English, since there is no similar grammatical form in English. The dictionary is right about motion verbs, and something like 行っている can mean both “is still being on the way” and “went and is currently still there”. The thing is, 向かう is not a motion verb, but it expresses a state-of-being, namely the state of being on your way somewhere.

Instead of に you could use まで or へ as well. The difference between に and へ is that に implies that you go to the city for a purpose, while へ means you’re just going there, possibly as an intermediate stop in your travel. まで means until, and has more or less the same meaning as に.

Conclusion

It should be something like 航海で町に向かっている, or politely 航海で町に向かっています

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It’s only a glottal stop when you’re spelling out the word. In normal speech there is no glottal stop in Japanese, everything is glued together. It is very important to make each mora of roughly the same length, though, since this is where the meaning is hiding.

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even distinct words usually :joy:

…whole paragraphs in a single breath :wink:

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Joughst gough woughth though flough

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thoughnks fough though coughrroughctiougn

(that i gets to stay because its role is to make the consonant ti)