"Haiku is the deep breath of life"

I have always been very fascinated by haikus. My first encounter with haikus was back in the 10th grade. For those who don't know, a haiku is a Japanese poetic text composed of three lines. Looks more or less like a ਮਾਹੀਆ /maahiaa/ (should be a topic for another blog post). It contains 5, 7, 5 syllables. A haiku is meant to be read aloud in a single breath. That is why it contains 17 syllables. But this rule is not easily adapted in other languages. I learned this through practice. I tried to write haiku in Punjabi with ignorance but that wasn't easy. Just the mere task of counting syllables "the English way" threw me off.

So in English, the technique for counting syllables is rather easy. You just clap to the sound of vowels or you could even just count them. I had to find out how it's done in Japanese. In Japanese, they differ between long and short vowels and they take double consonants and nasal consonants in the counting too!

1. Short vowel = 1 beat
2. Long vowel = 2 beats
3. Double consonants = 1 beat

4. Nasal consonant n at the end of a syllable = 1 beat

One thing lead to another. I didn't know what the system was in Punjabi. After some intense research, I learned it resembled the Japanese counting system. In Punjabi, the three first letters of the alphabet ੳ, ਅ, ੲ are the carriers (ਸਵਰ ਵਾਹਕ ਅੱਖਰ) of the vowels. hence we have ten vowels (ਸਵਰ /savar/) in Punjabi; 

ਉ, ਊ, ਓ, ਅ, ਆ, ਐ, ਔ, ਇ, ਈ, ਏ

These ten vowels are again divided in two, as in Japanese, short and long vowels.

Short vowels (ਲਘੂ)  = ਉ, ਅ, ਇ = 1 beat each

Long vowels (ਦੀਰਘ) = ਊ, ਓ, ਆ, ਐ, ਔ, ਈ, ਏ = 2 beats each

Both Urdu and Persian have long and short vowels and I imagine their counting system must be similar to Punjabi.

Punjabi has therefore their own genres of poetry with the counting system of the syllables. With that being said, haikus can be written in other languages too without being too strict with the number of syllables. The overall essence becomes more important.