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Phonetic length is contrastive for both vowels and consonants, and the total length of Japanese words can be measured in a unit of timing called the mora (from Latin mora "delay"). Only limited types of consonant clusters are permitted.
A mora (plural morae or moras; often symbolized μ) is a smallest unit of timing, equal to or shorter than a syllable, that theoretically or perceptually exists in some spoken languages in which phonetic length (such as vowel length) matters significantly.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration.In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Czech, Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), some Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish and Estonian), Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan ...
Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Japanese. Other languages, such as Greek , do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates. Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Finnish and Estonian; however, in languages like Italian, Norwegian , and Swedish ...
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment.
Japanese is another language in which vowel length is distinctive. For example, biru is a foreign loan word (clipped from a longer form) that means "building" whereas bīru is a foreign loan word for "beer".
Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな, IPA: [çiɾaɡaꜜna, çiɾaɡana(ꜜ)]) is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji. It is a phonetic lettering system.
Onbiki may also be found after kanji as indication of phonetic, rather than phonemic, length of a vowel (as in "キョン君、電話ー ").. When rendering English words into katakana, the chōonpu is often used to represent a syllable-final sequence of a vowel letter + r, which in English generally represents a long vowel if the syllable is stressed and a schwa if unstressed (in non-rhotic ...