With the reissue of this treatise, an instrumental step in the development of both moraic phonology and prosodic morphology becomes available again. This essential text presents a comprehensive treatment of syllable weight in phonology and of its consequences for weight-related phenomena, proposing that the basic tier consists of weight units equivalent to the morals of traditional synchronic and diachronic phonology. Turning to the unusual Gokana language of Nigeria, which may lack syllables entirely, Hyman argues that the proposed moraic representations may even be applied to many apparently syllable-based phenomena without syllables.