On (Japanese prosody) On (Japanese prosody) The term On (rarely "Onji") refers to counting phonetic sounds in Japanese poetry. In the Japanese language, the word ""on"" (音) means "sound". It is used to mean the phonetic units counted in haiku, tanka, and other such poetic forms. Known as "morae" to English-speaking linguists, the modern Japanese term for the linguistic concept is either "haku" () or "mōra" (). 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 grammarians to mean "phonic character" and was translated into English by
Mora (linguistics) moraic system of writing. For example, in the two-syllable word "mōra", the "ō" is a long vowel and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, モーラ, corresponding here to , each containing one mora. Such scholars also argue that the 5/7/5 pattern of the haiku in modern Japanese is of morae rather than syllables. The Japanese syllable-final "n" is also said to be moraic, as is the first part of a geminate consonant. For example, the Japanese name for "Japan", 日本, has two different pronunciations, one with three morae ("Nihon") and one with four ("Nippon"). In