Edit: My question was answered thank you very much.
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Hello people,
I have a question about haiku in japanese because I’m not really the sharpest tool in the shed and couldnt find a good answer to my question.
I gave ChatGPT an english sentence and told it to rewrite it as a haiku in japanese.
Since I only know the rules in english I’m unsure if a japanese person would accept it as a haiku because it has 5-6-5 characters with kanji in there and because of the kanji it has more syllables (at least how i define syllables in german lol).
The “haiku” in question:
神の息絶え/ 子らも命尽き/ 救いは無し
Kami no iki tae/ ko-ra mo inochi tsuki/ sukui wa nashi
God’s last breath/ The children are also dying/ There is no salvation
I hope someone can answer this for me and thank you very much in advance.
P.S.: It’s not meant to be spread and to pretend i wrote it, but for personal use, but i still want it to be correct.
4 comments
I am by no means an expert, but I think a haiku should contain 5-7-5 syllables. In yours, the first line has 7 and the second line has 8, and the last one contains 6. I don’t think the number of kanji matters, but rather how it is read.
It’s moras that count, not characters or syllables. So it’s actually 7-8-6:
か(ka)-み(mi)-の(no)-い(i)-き(ki)-た(ta)-え(e)
こ(ko)-ら(ra)-も(mo)-い(i)-の(no)-ち(chi)-つ(tsu)-き(ki)
す(su)-く(ku)-い(i)-は(wa)-な(na)-し(shi)
And afaik this wouldn’t be a proper haiku anyway because it doesn’t contain any seasonal references. I don’t really know that much about Japanese poetry, so maybe one of those words is considered a [季語](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kigo), though considering this is AI-generated I wouldn’t bet on it
Paging resident expert, u/hanzai_podcast.
If you don’t want to have the seasonal/nature aspect you can look up Senryū. That example still wouldn’t qualify though because of the mora count
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senry%C5%AB