Kawai, kawaii, and Kaua'i

What's your instinct?  How many syllables do you think there are in the following words?

kawaii かわいい (Japanese for "cute")

Kawai カワイ (the Japanese piano manufacturer)

Kauaʻi (name of one of the Hawaiian islands)

In English, it's our habit to treat diphthongs consisting of two vowels as one syllable, but that's not the way they do it in Japanese, which has no diphthongs.

I asked several of my Japanese Studies colleagues their opinions about the syllabicity of these three words.  Here are three replies:

Linda Chance:

Kaua'i カウアイ has four, and would not be confused with the first four-onsetsu word. It could be an alternate writing for the second.

Frank Chance:

Kawaii ("cute") has four syllables:  ka wa i and i.

Kawai (the piano manufacturer) has three syllables:  Ka wa and i.

Kaua'i — Not an expert on Hawai’ian but the sense from online is that it is kau-a-i.

David Spafford:

Kawaii has four, as far as I can tell. Even n ん counts as a syllable, by the way, at least in music.  Kawai has three.

My understanding is that the number of syllables is the same, but the Japanese does not have the glottal stop found in Kaua'i.

Part of the problem, at least for me (VHM), is the difference between onsetsu and syllables, also moras, for that matter.  See, for example:

Seiichiro Inaba, "Moras, Syllables, and Feet in Japanese", Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC12), 18-20 Feb, 1998, 106-117.

Han (1994) argues that moras are isochronous units, but no inference is drawn for isochrony regarding the length of the syllable in Japanese. As the tempo of speech increases, however, the phonetic reality of moras seems to become less obvious (Beckman 1982 and Larish 1989). This paper provides a new insight on the apparent gap between phonology and phonetics, which comes from the distinction between Initial Foot Parsing (IFP) and Surface Foot Parsing (SFP). Moreover, it emphasizes an important consideration of timing units larger than moras.

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. MORAS IN JAPANESE

Moras are traditionally considered to be abstract units, but ones that play a crucial role in Japanese phonology (Bloch 1950, Hockett 1955, and Ladefoged 1982). Japanese poetry is often cited as proof that the mora is a psychological unit. Haiku, consisting of three lines of five, seven, and five onsetsu, is one form of Japanese poetry. Onsetsu is often translated as 'syllables' in some of the Japanese literature, but this is a mistranslation. If the syllables are all light, as in (la), the syllable count and the mora count agree as to the onsetsu. But in (1b), the onsetsu of the poetry coincides with the mora count, but not the syllable count.

(1)a. Onsetsu = Mora = Syllable

fu ru i ke ya                    'an old pond'

ka wa zu to bi ko mu      'a frog hopped into'

mi zu no o to                    'the sound of water'

b. Onsetsu = Mora ≠ �Syllable

ka ki ku e ba                      'eating persimmon'

ka ne ga na ru na ru           'the bell rings'

hoo ryuu fi                          'at the Horyuji temple'

Selected readings

• "How to learn Chinese and Japanese" (2/17/14)
• "Sino-Roman hybrid characters" (8/26/16)
• "Sino-Roman hybrid characters" (11/25/18)
• "An Eighteenth-Century Japanese Language Reformer" (4/23/15)
• "New evidence for the development of hiragana?" (11/29/15)
• "Amazing things you can do with the Japanese writing system" (7/1/10)
• "Homophonophobia" (2/7/15)
• "Homographobia" (9/27/10)
• "How to teach Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese" (9/6/18)
• "Poetry as 'Word Temple' — NOT" (10/4/13)