Thus long ē (eta: η) can be understood as a sequence of two short vowels: ee.
A circumflex (ῆ) represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel (ée).
However, although a diphthong, such as oi, consists of two morae, stress may fall only on the first, a restriction not found with other vowel sequences such as io.
For example, in the two-syllable word mōra, the ō is a long vowel and counts as two morae.
For example, the Japanese name for Japan, 日本, has two different pronunciations, one with three morae (Nihon) and one with four (Nippon).
Similarly, the names Tōkyō (To-u-kyo-u, とうきょう), Ōsaka (O-o-sa-ka, おおさか), and Nagasaki (Na-ga-sa-ki, ながさき) all have four morae, even though, on this analysis, they have two, three and four syllables, respectively.
The "contracted sound" (拗音) is represented by the three small kana for ya (ゃ), yu (ゅ), yo (ょ).
[8] This set also has the peculiarity that, (barring only a couple of extreme examples, namely コーン茶 and チェーン店[9]), the drop in pitch of a word (so-called "downstep") cannot come after any of these "special mora," a useful tidbit for language learners trying to learn word pitch accents.
If Modern English is analyzed in terms of morae at all, which is contentious, the rules would be similar, except that all diphthongs would be considered bimoraic.
Sanskrit prosody and metrics have a deep history of taking into account moraic weight, as it were, rather than straight syllables, divided into laghu (लघु, 'light') and dīrgha/guru (दीर्घ/गुरु, 'heavy') feet based on how many morae can be isolated in each word.
The reason is that the conjoined consonants rt render the normally light ka syllable heavy.