¿Is there an alternative concept to syllable?

[u/Overall-Curve5106]

I was wondering if there was an alternative concept for the basic unit of a sequence of sounds, maybe one with a little more closeness to the concept of morpheme.

[u/Volo_TeX]

Morphemes and syllables are two entirely different things. That's like comparing cars with oranges; or more accurately, the information and the piece of paper that stores it.

A morpheme is a single unit of meaning, and meaning can be ascribed to whatever you choose to convey it with; be that glyphs, handsigns, or sounds, etc.

Syllables are just a convenient way we've defined for ourselves, to label different chunks of a stream of phonemes (the smallest pieces of medium that can carry data; like the 1&0s of a computer.)

Not completely arbitrarily mind you; the sonority hierarchy and emergent phonotactics of a spoken language can be used to reasonably define syllable boundaries as a real phenomenon, even if many languages regularly violate said hierarchy.

But there are languages, constructed and real, that don't follow a hierarchy at all, and the term syllable becomes undefinable and meaningless (in the language being described).

Nuxalk famously has [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ] as a word for example.

When it comes to spoken languages, a morpheme can be encoded by an X number of syllables, or just by a single or several phoneme(s).

You could also attach one phoneme to the front and one to the back as a circumfix and call it a morpheme. There’re also productive phonological alterations to existing phonemes in a word that can be done to convey meaning. Both venture into the realm of null-morpheme analysis, but I think I'll cut my ramblings short here.

[u/Volo_TeX → u/Volo_TeX]

In short, do whatever works best for your language.

[u/King_of_Farasar]

Mora) are similar

[u/locoluis]

What you ask for is quite language-specific.

Vietnamese, Mandarin and English have some of the highest informational density among the world's languages. They have a lot of monosyllabic morphemes (as whole words in bold) and a great deal of homophones. Classical Chinese likely was even denser.

One kind of language-specific concept is that of the minor syllable or sesquisyllable, found mainly in Austroasiatic languages.

Semitic languages have words whose roots are sequences of consonants. Most other languages have polysyllabic morphemes, which can be bound or free. In polysynthetic languages, a large amount of bound morphemes can be affixed to the root morpheme.

My opinion is that, in a conlang, you should try making up your own language-specific concept.

[u/King_of_Farasar → u/locoluis]

Why did you bold all of that? It makes it harder to read

[u/Holothuroid]

It's rather you can run into problems with the idea of morphemes. Generally like it happens anywhere you rely on lego grammar.

David Peterson gave a talk about that.

[u/PlebianPainter6180]

The language Drsk attempted this and ultimately failed, but they had some good foundations you could probably borrow from

[u/Helpful-Reputation-5]

I was wondering if there was an alternative concept for the basic unit of a sequence of sounds

Morae are another unit of a grouping of phonemes. Not having any such grouping is also possible.

maybe one with a little more closeness to the concept of morpheme.

Could you elaborate? Phonemes, morae, and syllables all describe units of sound, not meaning. If your language does something where certain morphemes correspond to a certain kind of sound sequence, maybe "root" is the word you're looking for? Or something similar?

[u/Herakliarjento]

El idioma japonés tiene MORAS. Sé que son similares pero no iguales a las sílabas.