Vowel length

IPA vowel length
ːˑ̆
IPA number 503 or 504 or 505
Encoding
Entity (decimal) ːˑ̆
Unicode (hex) U+02D0 or U+02D1 or U+0306

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may have arisen from one etymologically, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most other dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Finnish, Fijian, Japanese, Old English, Scottish Gaelic and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of dialects of British English and is said to be phonemic in a few other dialects, such as Australian English, South African English and New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike other varieties of Chinese.

Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically. Those that do usually distinguish between short vowels and long vowels. A very few languages distinguish three phonemic vowel lengths, such as Luiseño and Mixe. However, some languages with two vowel lengths also have words in which long vowels appear adjacent to other short or long vowels of the same type: Japanese hōō "phoenix" or Ancient Greek ἀάατος [a.áː.a.tos][1] "inviolable". Some languages that do not ordinarily have phonemic vowel length but permit vowel hiatus may similarly exhibit sequences of identical vowel phonemes that yield phonetically long vowels, such as Georgian გააადვილებ [ɡa.a.ad.vil.eb] "you will facilitate it".

Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels always occur on stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length. This gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long vowel, which is a short vowel found in a syllable immediately preceded by a stressed short vowel, e.g. i-so.

Among the languages that have distinctive vowel length, there are some where it may only occur in stressed syllables, e.g. in the Alemannic German dialect and Egyptian Arabic. In languages such as Czech, Finnish or Classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive in unstressed syllables as well.

In some languages, vowel length is sometimes better analyzed as a sequence of two identical vowels. In Finnic languages, such as Finnish, the simplest example follows from consonant gradation: haka → haan. In some cases, it is caused by a following chroneme, which is etymologically a consonant, e.g. jää "ice" ← Proto-Uralic *jäŋe. In non-initial syllables, it is ambiguous if long vowels are vowel clusters — poems written in the Kalevala meter often syllabicate between the vowels, and an (etymologically original) intervocalic -h- is seen in this and some modern dialects (e.g. taivaan vs. taivahan "of the sky"). Morphological treatment of diphthongs is essentially similar to long vowels. Interestingly, some old Finnish long vowels have developed into diphthongs, but successive layers of borrowing have introduced the same long vowels again, such that the diphthong and the long vowel again contrast (e.g. nuotti "musical note" vs. nootti "diplomatic note").

In Japanese, most long vowels are the results of the phonetic change of diphthongs; au and ou became ō, iu became , eu became , and now ei is becoming ē. The change also occurred after the loss of intervocalic phoneme /h/. For example, modern Kyōto (Kyoto) exhibits the following change: /kjauto/ → /kjoːto/. Another example is shōnen (boy): /seuneɴ/ → /sjoːneɴ/ [ɕoːneɴ].

Phonemic vowel length

Many languages make a phonemic distinction between long and short vowels: Arabic, Sanskrit, Japanese, Hebrew, Finnish, Hungarian, Kannada, etc.

Consider, for instance, the following example of minimal pairs in Italian:

Italian IPA Quality Etymology English
sentì /senˈti*/ short < lat. sentīre "He heard"
sentii /senˈtiː*/ long < lat. sentīre "I heard"

Long vowels may or may not be analyzed as separate phonemes. In Latin and Hungarian, long vowels are analyzed as separate phonemes from short vowels, which doubles the number of vowel phonemes.

Latin vowels
  Front Central Back
short long short long short long
High /ɪ/ /iː/   /ʊ/ /uː/
Mid /ɛ/ /eː/   /ɔ/ /oː/
Low   /a/ /aː/  

Vowel length contrasts with more than two phonemic levels are rare, and several hypothesized cases of three-level vowel length can be analysed without postulating this typologically unusual configuration.[2] Estonian has three distinctive lengths, but the third is suprasegmental, as it has developed from the allophonic variation caused by now-deleted grammatical markers. For example, half-long 'aa' in saada comes from the agglutination *saata+ka "send+(imperative)", and the overlong 'aa' in saada comes from *saa+ta "get+(infinitive)". As for languages that have three lengths, independent of vowel quality or syllable structure, these include Dinka, Mixe, Yavapai and Wichita. An example from Mixe is [poʃ] "guava", [poˑʃ] "spider", [poːʃ] "knot". In Dinka the longest vowels are three moras long, and so are best analyzed as overlong /oːː/ etc.

Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in kiKamba, there is [ko.ko.na], [kóó.ma̋], [ko.óma̋], [nétónubáné.éetɛ̂] "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".

Short and long vowels in English

Allophonic vowel length

In most dialects of the English language, for instance British Received Pronunciation and General American, there is complementary allophonic vowel length. Vowel phonemes are realized as longer vowel allophones before voiced consonant phonemes in the coda of a syllable, meaning vowels are lengthened before a voiced consonant. For example, the vowel phoneme /æ/ in /ˈbæt/ ‘bat’ is realized as a short allophone [æ] in [ˈbæt], because the /t/ phoneme is voiceless, while the same vowel /æ/ phoneme in /ˈbæd/ ‘bad’ is realized as a slightly long allophone (which could be transcribed as [ˈbæˑd]), because /d/ is voiced.

Symbolic representation of the two allophonic rules:

/æ/ [æˑ] | _ [ +consonant ]
+voiced
/ˈbæd/ [ˈbæˑd]
/æ/ [æ] | _ [ +consonant ]
−voiced
/ˈbæt/ [ˈbæt]

In addition, the vowels of Received Pronunciation are commonly divided into short and long, as obvious from their transcription. The short vowels are /ɪ/ (as in kit), /ʊ/ (as in foot), /ɛ/ (as in dress), /ʌ/ (as in strut), /æ/ (as in trap), /ɒ/ (as in lot), and /ə/ (as in the first syllable of ago and in the second of sofa). The long vowels are /iː/ (as in fleece), /uː/ (as in goose), /ɜː/ (as in nurse), /ɔː/ as in north and thought, and /ɑː/ (as in father and start). While a different degree of length is indeed present, there are also differences in the quality (lax vs tense) of these vowels, and the currently prevalent view tends to emphasise the latter rather than the former.

Contrastive vowel length

In Australian English, there is contrastive vowel length in closed syllables between long and short /e æ a/ and sometimes /ɪ/. The following can be minimal pairs of length for many speakers:

[bɪd] bid vs [bɪːd] beard
[feɹi] ferry vs [feːɹi] fairy
[mænɪŋ] Manning the last name vs [mæːnɪŋ] manning

Traditional long and short vowels in English orthography

English vowels are sometimes split into "long" and "short" vowels along lines different from the linguistic differentiation. Traditionally, the vowels /eɪ iː aɪ oʊ juː/ (as in bait beat bite boat bute) are said to be the "long" counterparts of the vowels /æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ/ (as in bat bet bit bot but) which are said to be "short". This terminology reflects their pronunciation before the Great Vowel Shift.

However, the use of the terms "long" and "short" in describing these vowel values is actually linguistically incorrect, as the letters in these words, although the same letter may be used, actually represent different vowels, that is, they are pronounced in spoken English as different vowels.

Traditional English phonics teaching, at the preschool to first grade level, often used the term "long vowel" for any pronunciation that might result from the addition of a silent E (e.g., like) or other vowel letter as follows:

Letter "Short" "Long" Example
A a /æ/ /eɪ/ mat / mate
E e /ɛ/ /iː/ pet / Pete
I i /ɪ/ /aɪ/ twin / twine
O o /ɒ/ /oʊ/ not / note
U u /ʌ/ /juː/ cub / cube

A mnemonic was that each vowel's long sound was its name. However, it is important to remember that the "a" in the word "mat" represents a different vowel sound than the "a" in "mate," it is not a long or short version of the same vowel sound. In this case, the terms "long" and "short" are incorrectly used to describe these vowel values.

In Middle English, the long vowels /iː, eː, ɛː, aː, ɔː, oː, uː/ were generally written i..e, e..e, ea, a..e, o..e, oo, u..e. With the Great Vowel Shift, they came to be pronounced /aɪ, iː, iː, eɪ, oʊ, uː, aʊ/. Because ea and oo are digraphs, they are not called long vowels today. Under French influence, the letter u was replaced with ou (or final ow), so it is no longer considered a long vowel either. Thus the so-called "long vowels" of Modern English are those vowels written with the help of a silent e.

Origin

Vowel length may often be traced to assimilation. In Australian English, the second element [ə] of a diphthong [eə] has assimilated to the preceding vowel, giving the pronunciation of bared as [beːd], creating a contrast with the short vowel in bed [bed].

Another common source is the vocalization of a consonant such as the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] or voiced palatal fricative, e.g. Finnish illative case, or even an approximant, as the English 'r'. A historically important example of this is the laryngeal theory, according to which many long vowels in the Indo-European languages were formed from short vowels followed by any one of several "laryngeal" sounds of Proto-Indo-European (conventionally written h1, h2 and h3). When a laryngeal followed a vowel, it was later lost in most Indo-European languages, and the preceding vowel became long. However, Proto-Indo-European possessed long vowels of other origin as well, usually as the result of older sound changes such as Szemerényi's law and Stang's law.

Vowel length may also have arisen as an allophonic quality of a single vowel phoneme, which may have then become split in two phonemes. For example, the Australian English phoneme /æː/ was created by the incomplete application of a rule extending /æ/ before certain voiced consonants, a phenomenon known as the bad–lad split. An alternative pathway to the phonemicization of allophonic vowel length is the shift of a vowel of a formerly different quality to become the short counterpart of a vowel pair; this is also exemplified by Australian English, where the contrast between /a/ (as in duck) and /aː/ (as in dark) was brought about by a lowering of earlier /ʌ/.

Estonian, of Finnic languages, exhibits a rare phenomenon, where allophonic length variation has become phonemic following the deletion of the suffixes causing the allophony. Estonian had already inherited two vowel lengths from Proto-Finnic, but a third one has been introduced by this phenomenon. For example, the Finnic imperative marker *-k caused the preceding vowels to be articulated shorter, and following the deletion of the marker, the allophonic length became phonemic, as shown in the example above.

Notations in the Latin alphabet

IPA

In the International Phonetic Alphabet the sign ː (not a colon, but two triangles facing each other in an hourglass shape; Unicode U+02D0) is used for both vowel and consonant length. This may be doubled for an extra-long sound, or the top half (ˑ) used to indicate a sound is "half long". A breve is used to mark an extra-short vowel or consonant.

Estonian has a three-way phonemic contrast:

saada [saːːda] "to get" (overlong)
saada [saːda] "send!" (long)
sada [sada] "hundred" (short)

Although not phonemic, the distinction can also be illustrated in certain accents of English:

bead [biːd]
beat [biˑt]
bid [bɪˑd]
bit [bɪt]

Diacritics

Additional letters

Consistent use: byta /ˈbyːta/ 'to change' vs bytta /ˈbytːa/ 'tub' and koma /ˈkoːma/ 'coma' vs komma /ˈkomaː/ 'to come'
Inconsistent use: fält /ˈfɛlt/ 'a field' and kam /ˈkam/ 'a comb' (but the verb 'to comb' is kamma)

Other signs

No distinction

Some languages make no distinction in writing. This is particularly the case with ancient languages such as Latin and Old English. Modern edited texts often use macrons with long vowels, however. Australian English does not distinguish the vowels /æ/ from /æː/ in spelling, with words like ‘span’ or ‘can’ having different pronunciations depending on meaning.

Notations in other writing systems

In non-Latin writing systems, a variety of mechanisms have also evolved.

References

  1. Liddell, H. G., and R. Scott (1996). A Greek-English Lexicon (revised 9th ed. with supplement). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.1
  2. Odden, David (2011). The Representation of Vowel Length. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, & Keren Rice (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to Phonology. Wiley-Blackwell, 465-490.
  3. http://www.babel.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/media/downloads/grammar/NorthernMansi/Phonology/Northern-Mansi_Phonemes_unified.pdf
  4. Carlo Porta on the Italian Wikisource

References

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