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Vowel length

IPA vowel length

aː aˑ

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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, and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of dialects of English English, and is
said to be phonemic in a few other dialects, such as Australian 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, and those that do usually distinguish
between short vowels and long vowels. There are very few languages that distinguish three
phonemic vowel lengths, for instance Luiseño and Mixe. However, some languages with two vowel
lengths also have words where long vowels appear adjacent to other short or long vowels of the
same type, e.g. Japanese hōō "phoenix", Estonian jäääärne "(on the) edge of the ice", or Ancient
Greek ἀάατος [a.áː.a.tos][1] "inviolable". Some languages that do not ordinarily have phonemic vowel
length but do permit vowel hiatus may similarly exhibit sequences of identical vowel phonemes that
yield phonetically long vowels, such as Georgianგააადვილებ [ɡa.a.ad.vil.eb] "you will facilitate it".
 Contents

[hide]

 1 Vowel length and related features

 2 Phonemic vowel length
 3 Short and long vowels in English
o 3.1 Allophonic vowel length
o 3.2 Contrastive vowel length
o 3.3 Traditional long and short vowels in English orthography

 4 Origin
 5 Notations in the Latin alphabet
o 5.1 IPA
o 5.2 Diacritics
o 5.3 Additional letters
o 5.4 Other signs
o 5.5 No distinction

 6 Notations in other writing systems

 7 Notes
 8 References

Vowel length and related features

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 " ← Proto-Uralic *jäŋe. In noninitial 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 yū, eubecame yō, 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 changes: /kjauto/ → /kjoːto/. Another example is shōnen (boy): /seuneɴ/ →
/sjoːneɴ/ [ɕoːneɴ].

Phonemic vowel length

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

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, thus doubling the number of vowel
phonemes.

Latin vowels

Front Central Back

lon
short long short short long
g

Hig
/ɪ/ /iː/ /ʊ/ /uː/
h

Mid /ɛ/ /eː/ /ɔ/ /oː/

Low /a/ /aː/

Japanese long vowels are analyzed as either two same vowels or a vowel + the pseudo-
phoneme /H/,[citation needed] and the number of vowels is five.

Japanese vowels

Front Central Back

short long short long short long

Hig /uu/ or /
/i/ /ii/ or /iH/ /u/
h uH/

/ee/ or / /oo/ or /
Mid /e/ /o/
eH/ oH/

/aa/ or /
Low /a/
aH/

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".

Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent
syllables.[citation needed] 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 consonantphonemes 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 unvoiced, 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:

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

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:
 "Short
Letter "Long" Example
"

Aa /æ/ /eɪ/ mat / mate

Ee /ɛ/ /iː/ pet / Pete

twin / twin
Ii /ɪ/ /aɪ/
e

Oo /ɒ/ /oʊ/ not / note

Uu /ʌ/ /juː/ cub / cube

A mnemonic was that each vowel's long sound was its name.

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[citation needed] 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 [saːta] "to get"

saada [saˑta] "send!"
sada [sata] "hundred"

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

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

 Macron (ā), used to indicate a long vowel

in Maori, Hawaiian, Samoan, Latvian and many transcription
 schemes, including romanizations for Sanskrit and Arabic,
the Hepburn romanization for Japanese, and Yale for Korean.
While not part of their standard orthography, the macron is also
used as a teaching aid in modern Latin and Ancient
Greektextbooks. Macron is also used in modern
official Cyrillic orthographies of some minority languages (Mansi,
[3]
Kildin Saami, Evenki)
 Breves (ă) are used to mark short vowels in
several linguistic transcription systems, as well as in Vietnamese.
 Acute accent (á), used to indicate a long vowel
in Czech, Slovak, Old Norse, Hungarian, Irish, and pre-20th
Century transcriptions of Sanskrit, Arabic, etc.
 Circumflex (â), used for example in Welsh. The circumflex is
occasionally used as a surrogate for the macrons, particularly in
Hawaiian and in the Kunrei-shiki romanization of Japanese.
 Grave accent (à) is used in Scottish Gaelic.
 Ogonek (ą), used in Lithuanian to indicate long vowels.
 Trema (ä), used in Aymara to indicate long vowels.
Additional letters

 Vowel doubling, used consistently

in Estonian, Finnish, Lombard and in closed syllables in Dutch.
Example: Finnish tuuli /ˈtuːli/ 'wind' vs. tuli /ˈtuli/ 'fire'.
 Estonian also has a rare "overlong" vowel length, but does not
distinguish this from the normal long vowel in writing; see the
example below.
 Consonant doubling after short vowels is very common
in Swedish and other Germanic languages, including English. The
system is somewhat inconsistent, especially in loan-words, around
consonant clusters and with word final nasal consonants.
Examples:
Consistent use: byta /ˈbyːta/ 'to change' vs bytta /ˈbyta/ 'tub' and koma /ˈkoːma/ 'coma'
vs komma /ˈkoma/ 'to come'
Inconsistent use: fält /ˈfɛlt/ 'a field' and kam /ˈkam/ 'a comb' (but the verb 'to comb'
is kamma)
 Classical Milanese orthography uses consonant doubling
in closed short syllables, e.g., lenguagg 'language'
and pubblegh 'public'.[4]
 ie is used to mark the long /iː/ sound in German. This is
due to the preservation and generalization of a
historical iespelling that originally represented the
sound /iə̯ /. In northern German, a following e letter
lengthens other vowels as well, e.g., in the
name Kues /kuːs/.
 A following h is frequently used in German and
older Swedish spelling, e.g., German Zahn [tsaːn] 'tooth'.
 In Czech, the additional letter ů is used for the long U
sound, where the character is known as a kroužek,
e.g., kůň"horse". (This actually developed from
the ligature "uo", which signified the diphthong /uo/, which
later shifted to /uː/.)
Other signs

 Apostrophe, used in Mi'kmaq, as evidenced by the name

itself. This is the convention of the Listuguj orthography
(Mi'gmaq), and a common substitution for the official acute
accent (Míkmaq) of the Francis-Smith orthography.
 Colon (punctuation), commonly used as an approximation
of the IPA phonetic transcription, and in a few
orthographies based on the IPA.
 Interpunct, commonly used in non-IPA phonetic
transcription, such as the Americanist system developed
by linguists for transcribing the indigenous languages of
the Americas. Example: Americanist [tʰo·] = IPA [tʰoː].
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.

 In abjads derived from the Aramaic alphabet,

notably Arabic and Hebrew, long vowels are written with
consonant letters (mostly approximant consonant letters) in
a process called mater lectionis, while short vowels are
typically omitted entirely. Most of these scripts also have
optional diacritics that can be used to mark short vowels
when needed.
 In South-Asian abugidas, such as Devanagari or the Thai
alphabet, there are different vowel signs for short and long
vowels.
 Ancient Greek also had distinct vowel signs, but only for
some long vowels; the vowel letters η (eta) and ω (omega)
originally represented long forms of the vowels represented
by the letters ε (epsilon) and ο (omicron - literally "small o",
by contrast with omega or "large o"). The other vowel
letters of Ancient Greek, α (alpha), ι (iota) and υ (upsilon),
could represent either short or long vowel phones.
 In the Japanese hiragana syllabary, long vowels are
usually indicated by adding a vowel character after. For
vowels /aː/, /iː/, and /uː/, the corresponding independent
vowel is added. Thus: あ (a), おかあさん, "okaasan",
mother; い (i), にいがた "Niigata", city in northern Japan
(usu. 新潟, in kanji); う (u), りゅう "ryuu" (usu. 竜), dragon.
The mid-vowels /eː/ and /oː/may be written with え (e)
(rare) (ねえさん (姉さん), neesan, "elder sister") and お (o)
[おおきい (usu 大きい), ookii, big], or with い (i) (めいれい
(命令), "meirei", command/order) and う (u) (おうさま (王
 様), ousama, "king") depending on etymological,
morphological, and historic grounds.
 Most long vowels in the katakana syllabary are written
with a special bar symbol ー (vertical in vertical
writing), called a chōon, as in メーカー mēkā "maker"
instead of メカ meka "mecha". However, some long
vowels are written with additional vowel characters, as
with hiragana, with the distinction being
orthographically significant.
 In the Korean Hangul alphabet, vowel length is not
distinguished in normal writing. Some dictionaries use a
double dot, ⟨:⟩, for example 무: “Daikon radish”.
 In the Classic Maya script, also based on syllabic
characters, long vowels in monosyllabic roots were
generally written with word-final syllabic signs ending in the
vowel -i rather than an echo-vowel.
Hence, chaach "basket", with a long vowel, was written
as cha-chi (compare chan "sky", with a short vowel, written
as cha-na). If the nucleus of the syllable was itself i,
however, the word-final vowel for indicating length was -
a: tziik- "to count; to honour, to sanctify" was written as tzi-
ka(compare sitz' "appetite", written as si-tz'i).

Notes

1. Jump up^ Liddell, H. G., and R. Scott (1996). A Greek-

English Lexicon (revised 9th ed. with supplement). Oxford:
Oxford University Press. p.1

2. Jump up^ 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. Jump
up^ http://www.babel.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/media/download
s/grammar/NorthernMansi/Phonology/Northern-
Mansi_Phonemes_unified.pdf
 4. Jump up^ Carlo Porta on the Italian Wikisource

References

 Some Features of the Vernacular Finnish of Jyväskylä

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