Mora is a linguistic term that determines the weight of a syllable based on the number of units it contains. Longer sounds are represented by two or three moras. Mora plays an important role in poetry and is used in Mora-based languages such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. In Japanese, mora is called haku, and it has been extensively studied in Japanese poetry. Some languages have trimoraic or super-heavy syllables with three moras.
A mora is the time it takes to say part of a syllable. It is a linguistic term and is part of phonology which aims to study the formation of sound. Each mora takes the same amount of time to pronounce; longer sounds are represented by two or even three moras as they take longer to pronounce. Not all languages even have rules about what is a mora and what isn’t. In languages where syllable length is important, mora can play an important role in linguistic forms such as poetry.
In phonology, a syllable is divided into one, two or three units. These units determine the number of moras and, therefore, the weight of the syllable. Syllables can consist of up to three parts: the nucleus, the onset and the coda. The nucleus is the main sound unit and the beginning and tail are consonants that come before and after the nucleus; the coda can also be a vowel.
The onset of a syllable does not count towards that syllable’s weight. The nucleus may consist of a short vowel or consonant that counts as a mora. A long vowel or consonant in the nucleus counts as two moras.
The length of vowels and consonants varies greatly between languages. In many languages, consonants are only short. In Slovak, on the other hand, consonants can be short or long. In Malayalam, a consonant adds no weight to the syllable and counts as zero moras.
Queues do not automatically add length to the syllable weight of a language. In Japanese, all tails count as one mora. The coda also carries weight in Hindi and Malayalam, but not in Irish. In English, the coda only counts as one if it is underlined.
A syllable that contains a mora is called monomoraic and is classified as a light syllable. When there are two moras in the syllable, it is bimoraic and is a heavy syllable. Most languages have monomoraic or bimoraic syllables, but some languages such as Old English and Farsi have trimoraic or super-heavy syllables with three moras.
In addition to their role in everyday speech, mora are important to poetry. Classical languages such as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit are Mora-based languages. The poetry of these languages tends to use dactylic meter with combinations of long and short syllables providing rhythm.
In Japanese, mora is called haku. The role of the haku has been extensively studied in Japanese. It has also been speculated by linguists that the Japanese poetic form of haiku should not be thought of as 17 syllables, as is often the case in English, but as 17 moras because it comes closest to Japanese.
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