Mora-timed language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In every language, speech emission is based on a sequence of elementary sound units; some of them play a specific part: through their isochronic recurrence, they produce the rhythm of the sentences. In a mora-timed language, these rhythm units are moras. Some linguists group mora-timed languages together with syllable-timed languages, as a particular case of them.

However, such a classification should be used carefully, a spoken language being less settled than a written language ; thus the way the rhythm is produced may vary from one region to another, or with time.

Japanese and Luganda are examples of mora-timed languages.

[edit] See also

• Timing (linguistics)
• Stress-timed language
• Syllable-timed language

[edit] External links

• Étude sur la discrimination des langues par la prosodie (pdf document) (French)
• Languages’ rhythm and language acquisition (pdf document)
• Supra-segmental Phonology (rhythm, intonation and stress-timing)