Re: mora

Ray Brown wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 23, 2004, at 11:00 , Tim May wrote:
>>
>> I don't believe "mora" is a native Japanese word, although
>> people learning Japanese often assume this (certainly I did).
>>
>> Evidence for this:
>>
>>  http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/モーラ
>>
>> The _Japanese_ Wikipedia entry for mora a) spells the word in katakana,
>> and b) says it's from Latin.  (Note that in Japanese the first
>> syllable is long).
>
>
> Interesting - in the original Latin both syllables were monomoraic. I'm
> sure, however, the Japanese borrowed it via English.
Probably because the first syllable is stressed in English. I think
native Japanese speakers tend to interpret stress accent as vowel
length, rather than as the equivalent to their pitch accent.