''On'' (音; rarely ''onji'') are the phonetic units in

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

poetry. In the Japanese language, the word means "sound". It includes the phonetic units counted in

haiku is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kire ...

tanka is a genre of classical Japanese poetry and one of the major genres of Japanese literature. Etymology Originally, in the time of the influential poetry anthology (latter half of the eighth century AD), the term ''tanka'' was used to disti ...

, and other such poetic forms. Known as "

mora Mora may refer to: People * José Maria Mora (1847–1926), Cuban-American photographer, often credited as "Mora" * Mora (singer) (born 1996), a Puerto Rican singer * Mora (surname), a Spanish name (includes a list of people with the name) Plac ...

e" to English-speaking linguists, the modern Japanese term for the linguistic concept is either ''haku'' ( 拍) or ''mōra'' ( モーラ). Ji (字) is Japanese for "symbol" or "character". The concatenation of the two words ''on'' and ''ji'' into ''onji'' (音字) was used by

Meiji era The was an Japanese era name, era of History of Japan, Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868, to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feu ...

grammarians to mean "phonic character" and was translated into English by Nishi Amane in 1870 as "letter". Since then, the term "onji" has become obsolete in Japan, and only survives in foreign-language discussion of

Japanese poetry Japanese poetry is poetry typical of Japan, or written, spoken, or chanted in the Japanese language, which includes Old Japanese, Early Middle Japanese, Late Middle Japanese, and Modern Japanese, as well as poetry in Japan which was written in th ...

. Gilbert and Yoneoka call the use of the word ''"onji"'' "bizarre and mistaken". It was taken up after a 1978 letter to ''Frogpond: Journal of the

Haiku Society of America The Haiku Society of America is a non-profit organization composed of haiku poets, editors, critics, publishers and enthusiasts that promotes the composition and appreciation of haiku in English. Founded in 1968, it is the largest society dedicate ...

'' decrying the then-current use of the word "jion", which itself appears to have arisen in error.Richard Gilbert
Stalking the Wild Onji
/ref> Counting ''on'' in Japanese poetry is the same as counting characters when the text is transliterated into

hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", ...

. In cases where a hiragana is represented by a pair of symbols each pair (or "digraph" e.g. "kyo" (きょ)) equates to a single ''on''. When viewed this way, the term "''ji''" ("character") is used in Japanese. In English-language discussions of Japanese poetry, the more familiar word "

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

" is sometimes used. Although the use of "syllable" is inaccurate, it sometimes happens that the syllable count and the ''on'' count match in Japanese-language haiku. The disjunction between syllables and ''on'' becomes clearer when counting sounds in English-language versions of Japanese poetic forms, such as

haiku in English A haiku in English is an English-language poem written in a form or style inspired by Japanese haiku. Like their Japanese counterpart, haiku in English are typically short poems and often reference the seasons, but the degree to which haiku in Engl ...

. An English syllable may contain one, two or three morae and, because English word sounds are not readily representable in hiragana, a single syllable may require many more ''ji'' to be transliterated into hiragana. There is disagreement among linguists as to the definitions of "syllable" and "mora".Ellen Broselaw, ''Skeletal Positions and Moras'', in John A Goldsmith (ed.), ''The Handbook of Phonological Theory''. Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, , p175ff In contrast, ''ji'' (and hence ''on'') is unambiguously defined by reference to hiragana.

Examples

To illustrate the distinction between ''on'' and syllables, the first four of the following words each contain the same number of ''on'', but different numbers of syllables, and the fifth shows a variant of the fourth with one less ''on'' but the same number of syllables: The examples show the various ways in which hiragana differ from syllables. In ''Nagasaki'' each hiragana character represents a single on, and hence the four hiragana are also four syllables. In ''Ōsaka'', the initial O is a long (doubled) vowel (denoted with a macron over the vowel in rōmaji), and hence counts as two ''on''. ''Tōkyō'' includes two long vowels, which contribute two ''on'' each in Japanese but only one syllable each, which does not distinguish long vowels from short. In ''Nippon'' the doubled "P" each is pronounced separately; the final "N" is also a separate hiragana, so the two English syllables translate to four ''on''.

References

{{Japanese poetry Phonetics Japanese poetry Japanese literary terminology