Talk:On (Japanese prosody)

Onji

In the Playsation 2 game Shinobido, Onji is the name of a character.

He is a cat.

Archaisms

There are two references for on being an archaism, one is broken and the other contradicts the statement. It says that on is current, as is ji but that onji is not. Tesspub (talk) 09:53, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree the article is somewhat contradictory. The first ref you refer to was never online, so I've deleted its link to the periodical's web presence. I've added a further ref at the end. Do you want to try and make sense of them all? --Yumegusa (talk) 10:19, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I've had a crack at it!

I'm still confused by "Since then, the term has become obsolete in Japan.." Does that refer to on or onji? --Alobodig (talk) 12:19, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Where?

The article refers to "onji" being used in discussion of English-language haiku but I have not been able to find any British references. I am getting the impression that the term is not known outside North America. Certainly I (a Brit) had never heard the word until coming across it here; "morae" yes, "onji" no. Tesspub (talk) 19:52, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Well I'm unamerican and I've been aware of the term for some time. Here you'll find an article that appeared a couple of years back in Blithe Spirit (UK haiku mag). Here is Alan Summers (UK poet) referring to onji. Here John Carley (British renku theorist) refers to onji (albeit with tongue in cheek). A search on google.fr and google.de will confirm its use is not restricted to English-language haiku either. --Yumegusa (talk) 21:26, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Interesting that The Disjunctive Butterfly uses "imagistically" to mean (I think!) pertaining to imagery. Tesspub (talk) 23:22, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Rename?

I think this article should be renamed "Hyōon moji", reworded to de-emphasise "onji" and a redirect created from "Onji". (I have no idea how to the rename or the redirect) Tesspub (talk) 23:26, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I understand your thinking, but see WP:TITLE:

the ideal title is:

• Recognizable – Using names and terms commonly used in reliable sources, and so likely to be recognized, for the topic of the article.

Can you make a case in spite of this? --Yumegusa (talk) 00:41, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Probably not. Mind you, I wasn't familiar with onji either! Tesspub (talk) 12:23, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

This page is not merely the "onji" page, it is also the (redirect) page for "on" (primarily in the discussion of poetry). It makes much more sense to redirect "on" to "onji" than to redirect the opposite direction, since "on" is such a ubiquitous word in English that putting a top-level page for the Japanese meaning would be confusing. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 21:41, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Redirects can be redirected, so that's not an argument against renaming this article. As far as I can see, no-one was suggesting renaming it on (which is, and will remain, a disambiguation page). In principle it could be renamed to On (poetry) (analogous to Waka (poetry)), but I see no case for it. --Yumegusa (talk) 22:53, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

I have been nagged by fellow haiku enthusiasts to make just this change - so I have. I think it helps reduce the general level of ignorance by a tiny smidgeon. Tesspub (talk) 12:37, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Digraphs

Yumegusa, I think your edit has introduced (or maybe revealed) some ambiguity. Most hiragana are represented by single symbols. Some are represented by two symbols (the second being slightly smaller); these are known as digraphs. The point I was trying to make was the one digraph = one onji, not two as you might otherwise think. As it's now phrased (and perhaps as it was phrased previously) it seems to imply that all hiragana are digraphs. Tesspub (talk) 10:41, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't mean it to mean that, but I see what you mean. Thanks for editing that out. --Yumegusa (talk) 12:41, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Gilbert and Yoneoka originally wrote "bizzare" ?

Or the then editor misspelt "bizarre" ? ஒலிசிந்நெக் (talk) 06:26, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm sure that they did not write "bizzare" nor "bizarre". Double quotations are improper. See their PDF p.35/37 note [21]. ஒலிசிந்நெக் (talk) 08:28, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

1 mora in a syllable

As a linguist, I am confused by the explanation, especially the final part where an English example is given. In Linguistics, a mora is the central unit of sound in a syllable (it may be the only sound too) to which an onset (opening sounds) or coda (ending sounds) are added.

So, to say that "Give me strength" has more than 3 morae is a bit odd, to me...I mean, it has three: /I/ in GIVE, /i/ in ME and the diphthong /ej/ in STRENGTH. There are no other syllables in that sentence to have any other morae.

So, I think we could be dealing with a situation of terminology in Haiku not matching terminology in linguistics. If there is some other unit of measurement at work here, such as syllable timing, perhaps we should find another term in English to use. Mora is certainly not it. 71.57.186.90 (talk) 01:17, 1 January 2012 (UTC)Tom in Florida