Anacreontics are verses in a metre used by the Greek poet Anacreon in his poems dealing with love and wine. His later Greek imitators (whose surviving poems are known as the Anacreontea ) took up the same themes and used the Anacreontic meter. In modern poetry, Anacreontics are short lyrical pieces that keep the Anacreontic subject matter but not the metre.
35-531: The Anacreontic verse or anacreonteus is the eight-syllable line u u – u – u – – (where u = breve and – longum ). It has been suggested that the anacreontic in its origin may be an " anaclastic " variant of the Ionic dimeter (u u – – u u – –), i.e. an ionic dimeter with the 4th and 5th syllables reversed; but whether this is so or not, the two meters have been associated since Anacreon, who often used them together in compositions. One example of anacreontics from
70-481: A geminate consonant . For example, the Japanese name for Japan , 日本 , has two different pronunciations, one with three morae ( Nihon ) and one with four ( Nippon ). In the hiragana spelling, the three morae of Ni-ho-n are represented by three characters ( にほん ), and the four morae of Ni-p-po-n need four characters to be written out as にっぽん . The latter can also be analysed as Ni-Q-po-n , with
105-468: A syllable , that exists in some spoken languages in which phonetic length (such as vowel length ) matters significantly. For example, in the Japanese language , the name of the city Ōsaka ( おおさか ) consists of three syllables ( O-sa-ka ) but four morae ( O-o-sa-ka ), since the first syllable, Ō , is pronounced with a long vowel (the others being short). Thus, a short vowel contains one mora and
140-501: A + i , or one long and one short vowel, ā + i ) is assigned a value of two mātrā s. In addition, there is pluta (trimoraic) and dīrgha pluta ('long pluta ' = quadrimoraic). Sanskrit prosody and metrics have a deep history of taking into account moraic weight, as it were, rather than straight syllables, divided into laghu ( लघु , 'light') and dīrgha / guru ( दीर्घ / गुरु , 'heavy') feet based on how many morae can be isolated in each word. Thus, for example,
175-543: A couple of extreme examples, namely コーン茶 and チェーン店 ), the drop in pitch of a word (so-called "downstep") cannot come after any of these "special mora," a useful tidbit for language learners trying to learn word pitch accents. In Luganda , a short vowel constitutes one mora while a long vowel constitutes two morae. A simple consonant has no morae, and a doubled or prenasalised consonant has one. No syllable may contain more than three morae. The tone system in Luganda
210-492: A light as a brevis (and in the modern day, reflecting the ancient terms, a longum is often called a "long syllable" and a brevis a "short syllable", potentially creating confusion between syllable length and vowel length ). Similarly, in Classical Sanskrit meter , metrical patterns consisted of arrangements of syllable weight groups, called gaṇas (parallel to Greek metrical feet ). A heavy syllable
245-411: A moraic system of writing. For example, in the two-syllable word mōra , the ō is a long vowel and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, モーラ , corresponding here to mo-o-ra , each containing one mora. Therefore, the 5/7/5 pattern of the haiku in modern Japanese is of morae rather than syllables. The Japanese syllable-final n is also moraic, as is the first part of
280-475: A section of his poems "anacreontiques" because they were paraphrased out of the so-called writings of Anacreon into a familiar measure which was supposed to represent the meter of the Greek . Half a century later, when the form had been much cultivated, John Phillips (1631–1706) laid down the arbitrary rule that an anacreontic line "consists of seven syllables, without being tied to any certain law of quantity." In
315-516: A short vowel or the last mora of a long vowel ( é , eé ). A circumflex ( ῆ ) represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel ( ée ). Gilbertese , an Austronesian language spoken mainly in Kiribati , is a trimoraic language. The typical foot in Gilbertese contains three morae. These trimoraic constituents are units of stress in Gilbertese. These "ternary metrical constituents of
350-532: A syllable would have more than four otherwise. In the Old English period, all content words (as well as stressed monosyllables) had to be at least two morae long. In Sanskrit , the mora is expressed as the mātrā . For example, the short vowel a (pronounced like a schwa ) is assigned a value of one mātrā , the long vowel ā is assigned a value of two mātrā s, and the compound vowel (diphthong) ai (which has either two simple short vowels,
385-649: Is based on morae. See Luganda tones and Luganda grammar . In Old English, short diphthongs and monophthongs were monomoraic, long diphthongs and monophthongs were bimoraic, consonants ending a syllable were each one mora, and geminate consonants added a mora to the preceding syllable. If Modern English is analyzed in terms of morae at all, which is contentious, the rules would be similar, except that all diphthongs would be considered bimoraic. Probably in Old English, like in Modern English, syllables could not have more than four morae, with loss of sounds occurring if
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#1732794113519420-475: Is called monomoraic , while a long vowel contains two and is called bimoraic . Extra-long syllables with three morae ( trimoraic ) are relatively rare. Such metrics based on syllables are also referred to as syllable weight . In Japanese, certain consonants also stand on their own as individual morae and thus are monomoraic. The term comes from the Latin word for 'linger, delay', which was also used to translate
455-446: Is light for the same reason. The next syllable, the second syllable of the word virumque , is heavy ("long by position") because it contains a short vowel followed by more than one consonant (the M and then the Q). But, for example, the first syllable of the word Troiae is heavy ("long by nature") because it contains a diphthong, regardless of the sounds coming after it. Likewise,
490-405: Is not always equal to the number of graphemes when written in kana; for example, even though it has four morae, the Japanese name for Tōkyō ( とうきょう ) is written with five graphemes, because one of these graphemes ( ょ ) represents a yōon , a feature of the Japanese writing system that indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized . The "contracted sound" ( 拗音 ) is represented by
525-472: Is said to have the property of quantity sensitivity. For the purpose of determining accent in Ancient Greek , short vowels have one mora, and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae. Thus long ē ( eta : η ) can be understood as a sequence of two short vowels: ee . Ancient Greek pitch accent is placed on only one mora in a word. An acute ( έ , ή ) represents high pitch on the only mora of
560-415: The meter of the line. A heavy syllable is a syllable with a branching nucleus or a branching rime , although not all such syllables are heavy in every language. A branching nucleus generally means the syllable has a long vowel or a diphthong ; this type of syllable is abbreviated as CVV. A syllable with a branching rime is a closed syllable , that is, one with a coda (one or more consonants at
595-504: The phonology of some languages, especially with regard to the assignment of stress . For instance, in the Sezer stress pattern in Turkish observed in place names, the main stress occurs as an iamb (i.e. penultimate stress) one syllable to the left of the final syllable: (L' L )σ. However, when the foot contains a heavy syllable in the first syllable while the second syllable is light,
630-447: The 18th century, the antiquary William Oldys (1696–1761) was the author of a little piece which is the perfect type of an anacreontic; this begins: In 1800 Thomas Moore published a collection of erotic anacreontics which are also typical in form; Moore speaks of the necessity of catching "the careless facility with which Anacreon appears to have trifled," as a reason why anacreontics are often tame and worthless. He dwells, moreover, on
665-671: The Greek word χρόνος : chrónos ('time') in its metrical sense. The general principles for assigning moras to segments are as follows (see Hayes 1989 and Hyman 1985 for detailed discussion): In general, monomoraic syllables are called "light syllables", bimoraic syllables are called "heavy syllables", and trimoraic syllables (in languages that have them) are called "superheavy syllables". Some languages, such as Old English and potentially present-day English, can have syllables with up to four morae. A prosodic stress system in which moraically heavy syllables are assigned stress
700-400: The Q representing a full mora of silence. In this analysis, っ (the sokuon ) indicates a one-mora period of silence. Similarly, the names Tōkyō ( To-u-kyo-u , とうきょう ), Ōsaka ( O-o-sa-ka , おおさか ), and Nagasaki ( Na-ga-sa-ki , ながさき ) all have four morae, even though, on this analysis, they have two, three and four syllables, respectively. The number of morae in a word
735-444: The above rules of heavy and light syllables: As noted above, the number and order of heavy and light syllables in a line of poetry (together with word breaks ) articulated the meter of the line, such as the most famous classical meter, the epic dactylic hexameter . Mora (linguistics) A mora (plural morae or moras ; often symbolized μ ) is a theoretical or perceptual smallest unit of timing , equal to or shorter than
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#1732794113519770-575: The absurdity of writing "pious anacreontics," a feat, however, which was performed by several of the Greek Christian poets, and in particular by Gregory of Nazianzus and John of Damascus . Syllable weight In linguistics , syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime . In classical Indo-European verse, as developed in Greek , Sanskrit , and Latin , distinctions of syllable weight were fundamental to
805-508: The coda is a sonorant) and other CVC syllables are light (for instance if the coda is an obstruent). Some languages distinguish a third type, CVVC syllables (with both a branching nucleus and a coda) and/or CVCC syllables (with a coda consisting of two or more consonants) as superheavy syllables . In moraic theory , heavy syllables are analyzed as containing two morae, light syllables one, and superheavy syllables three. The distinction between heavy and light syllables plays an important role in
840-586: The corpus of Anacreon is fr. 11b PMG , which ends as follows: ἄγε δηὖτε μηκέτ' οὕτω πατάγωι τε κἀλαλητῶι Σκυθικὴν πόσιν παρ' οἴνωι μελετῶμεν, ἀλλὰ καλοῖς ὑποπίνοντες ἐν ὕμνοις. áge dēûte mēkét' hoútō patágōi te kalalētôi Skuthikḕn pósin par' oínōi meletômen, allà kaloîs hupopínontes en húmnois. Come (pour) again, but this time let's not drink our wine Scythian-style with crashing and shouting, but drinking gently with beautiful hymns. u u – u – u – – u u – u – u – – u u – u – u – – u u – u – u – – u u – – u u – – In this extract,
875-444: The end of the syllable); this type of syllable is abbreviated CVC. In some languages, both CVV and CVC syllables are heavy, while a syllable with a short vowel as the nucleus and no coda (a CV syllable) is a light syllable . In other languages, only CVV syllables are heavy, while CVC and CV syllables are light. In yet other languages, CVV syllables are heavy and CV syllables are light, while some CVC syllables are heavy (for instance if
910-426: The fifth syllable of the second line (the first of the word fato ) is heavy ("long by nature") because it contains a long vowel, and it will be heavy no matter what sounds come after. (The word "Italiam" is a special case, in that poets treat it as having a long-by-nature first syllable which it actually has not, in order to make it fit somehow.) Terming a syllable "long by position" is equivalent to noting that
945-593: The first four lines are anacreontics, while the last is an ionic dimeter. The anacreontic rhythm also occurs in classical Persian poetry, for example in the following example from the 13th-century poet Saadi : The syllables ast , nāh and gāh are "overlong" and count in Persian metre as equivalent to – u. In English poetry, Anacreontics are the title given to short lyrical pieces, of an easy kind, dealing with love and wine. The English word appears to have been first used in 1656 by Abraham Cowley , who called
980-428: The first, a restriction not found with other vowel sequences such as io. That is, there is a distinction between oi, a bimoraic syllable, and io, which is two syllables. Most dialects of Japanese , including the standard, use morae, known in Japanese as haku ( 拍 ) or mōra ( モーラ ), rather than syllables, as the basis of the sound system. Writing Japanese in kana ( hiragana and katakana ) demonstrates
1015-405: The iamb shifts to a trochee (i.e. antepenultimate stress) because there is a requirement that main stress fall on a heavy syllable whenever possible: (' H L)σ, and not *(H' L )σ. In Ancient Greek hexameter poetry and Latin literature , lines followed certain metrical patterns, such as based on arrangements of heavy and light syllables. A heavy syllable was referred to as a longum and
1050-401: The kana for n ( ん ), the "geminate consonant" ( 促音 ) represented by the small tsu ( っ ), the "long sound" ( 長音 ) represented by the long vowel symbol ( ー ) or a single vowel which extends the sound of the previous mōra ( びょ「う」いん ) and the "diphthong" ( 二重母音 ) represented by the second vowel of two consecutive vowels ( ばあ「い」 ). This set also has the peculiarity that, (barring only
1085-473: The sort found in Gilbertese are quite rare cross-linguistically, and as far as we know, Gilbertese is the only language in the world reported to have a ternary constraint on prosodic word size." In Hawaiian , both syllables and morae are important. Stress falls on the penultimate mora, though in words long enough to have two stresses, only the final stress is predictable. However, although a diphthong , such as oi, consists of two morae, stress may fall only on
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1120-555: The syllable ends with a consonant (a closed syllable), because Latin and Greek speakers in the classical era pronounced a consonant as part of a preceding syllable only when it was followed by other consonants, due to the rules of Greek and Latin syllabification . In a consonant cluster, one consonant ends the preceding syllable and the rest start the following syllable. For example, Latin syllabifies volat as vo-lat but dignus as dig-nus and monstrum as mon-strum . A few exceptions to and elaborations of
1155-525: The three small kana for ya ( ゃ ), yu ( ゅ ), yo ( ょ ). These do not represent a mora by themselves and attach to other kana; all the rest of the graphemes represent a mōra on their own. Most dialects of Japanese are pitch accent languages, and these pitch accents are also based on morae. There is a unique set of mōra known as "special mora" ( 特殊拍 ) which cannot be pronounced by itself but still counts as one mora whenever present. These consist of "nasal sound" ( 撥音 ) represented by
1190-631: Was light if it was an open syllable and contained only a short vowel. An example in Latin: The first syllable of the first word ( arma ) is heavy ("long by position") because it contains a short vowel (the A) followed by more than one consonant (R and then M)—and if not for the consonants coming after it, it would be light. The second syllable is light because it contains a short vowel (an A) followed immediately by only one consonant (the V). The next syllable
1225-401: Was named guru , and a light syllable was laghu . A syllable was considered heavy if it contained a long vowel or a diphthong (and was therefore "long by nature"—it would be long no matter what) or if it contained a short vowel that was followed by more than one consonant ("long by position", long by virtue of its relationship to the consonants following). On the other hand, a syllable
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