'kimono' pronun & use

[Douglas G. Wilson]

I can't find an audio file of "kimono" in Japanese right away, but here is
the Japanese syllable "no":

http://physics.uwyo.edu/~brent/jal/no.wav

Japanese "o" doesn't sound like a schwa to my naive ear. It sounds about
like Spanish /o/ to me. Something like /O/ or "aw" in English maybe.

I speak from my usual position of relative ignorance and defer to any
expert. I have listened to many hours of presumably-more-or-less-standard
Japanese recently (TV, movies).

Note that the "o" in "kimono" is different from the "long 'o'" ("oo"/"ou")
found in "Shinto", "judo", "Tokyo", etc. ... which MAY account for the lack
of reduction of final orthographic "o" in such words in contrast to schwa
in English "kimono" (or sometimes "kakemono" etc.). OTOH I casually wonder
whether "kimona" was to some degree modeled on "pajama" or "camisa" or
something like that.

-- Doug Wilson