Welcome to moriz.party.
I am cleaning dust off a webpage I bought two years ago, before I went to Canada.
It’s approaching midnight. I’m in Mission Beach, San Diego.
Tomorrow, I’ll make a day trip to Tijuana.
I thought it’d be funny to write a small haiku for /blog.
Haikus are split into three lines with 5-7-5 syllables per.
Syllables are funny.
When I was younger, I struggled to clap syllables out in words.
The boundaries are often ambiguous. Vowels usually anchor syllables, but unstressed vowels reduce, consonants slide between syllables, and speech rhythm matters more than neat division!!
In Japanese, each mora is one rhythmic unit.
The sound structure is almost always:
(C)V(N)
Each unit lands cleanly and occupies the same amount of time.
English doesn’t work like that. English syllables aren’t time equal, and they aren’t structurally simple. A single English syllable can contain:
CCCVCCCC
For example:
- strengths -> one syllable, up to eight phonemes
- fire -> one or two syllables, depending on the speaker
So when English tries to copy 5-7-5, it’s copying the number, not the rhythm.
English haikus suck.