[split] Snow where else to be (in February)

[Apache]

Good points! I thought I was sticking close to the "original haiku", but I guess I am wrong. I always understood it as 5-7-5 (or less, since our syllables are longer than their ..I don't know what the word is), and that it had to be about season or nature, combining two images. A lot of people today just do the 5-7-5 format and call it a haiku. I thought that was wrong, but I hadn't realised how different our "haiku" is from the Japanese haiku, given the visual aspect.  Maybe what we do really is just minimal poetry, which is a fun exercise to do.

Well, the thing is with haiku in the original Japanese is that 5-7-5 aren't actually counted in syllables, they are counted in phonetic units called on. There isn't always a one-to-one mapping between on and a Western conception of a syllable. For example, the name "Tokyo" is two-syllables (maybe three if you pronounce it strangely) the way we Westerners consider syllables, but it is actually composed of four on. So, the names "Nagasaki" and "Tokyo", despite differing in syllable length, actually have the same number of on! The closest concept Western linguistics has to an on is called a mora, which is probably more "accurate" to use as the counting unit in a haiku rather than a syllable.

So, it makes the question of what counting units you use in non-Japanese-language haikus an interesting question. The simplest approach is to do what most people do and simply use Western syllables as the counting unit, because it would be unreasonable to expect people to translate everything into and then back from Japanese to rigorously follow the standards of the form. A better approach is probably to use mora, but then that makes your haikus a little more inaccessible to people that don't understand mora. On are a much more important part of Japanese language structure and understanding than mora are to Westerners that aren't practiced linguists.

Of course, this is all just academic, and since 99% of people just use syllables there's no issue with doing that and calling it a haiku. I guess properly speaking Westerners should have a different name for the 5-7-5 format, since we don't follow many of the other conventions of traditional haiku writing (for example, the Japanese always write them in a single vertical line ... we use the three separate lines simply to emphasize the 5-7-5 format, but in Japanese haiku it is only implicit). The word haiku descends from an abbreviation of the phrase "haikai no ku", which translates as something along the lines of "comic verse" or "unorthodox verse", but typically with connotations of lightness or jocosity. In fact, "haikai" is a more generic term for a broader category of Japanese poetry of which haikus and senryus are really considered a special type. All this to say, I think if you actually wanted to call the 5-7-5 syllable structure poem something other than haiku to differentiate it from "true"/traditional Japanese haikus, you would probably want to come up with a phrase using the English equivalent of "haikai no ku".