In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels.
On one hand, many languages do not distinguish vowel length phoneme, meaning that vowel length alone does not change the meanings of words. However, the amount of time a vowel is uttered can change based on factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it: the phonetic environment. An example is that vowels tend to be pronounced longer before a voiced consonant and shorter before a voiceless consonant in the standard accents of American and British English.
On the other hand, vowel length is indeed an important phonemic factor in certain languages, meaning vowel length can change word-meanings, for example in Arabic, Czech phonology, Dravidian languages (such as Tamil language), some Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish and Estonian), Japanese, Kyrgyz phonology, Samoan, and Xhosa. Some languages in the past likely had the distinction even though their modern descendants do not, with an example being Latin versus its descendent Romance languages like Spanish and French. Length also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike in other varieties of Chinese, which do not have phonemic vowel length distinctions.
Whether vowel length alone changes word-meanings in English language depends on the particular dialect; it is able to do so in a few non-rhotic dialects, such as Australian English, Lunenburg English, New Zealand English, South African English, and possibly some (vernacular) English of Southern England. For instance, vowel length can distinguish park from puck in Australian and New Zealand English, or bared from bed in any of these dialects. Phonemic vowel length perhaps marginally occurs in a few rhotic dialects too, such as Scottish English and Northern Irish English (see Scottish vowel length rule).
Languages that do distinguish vowel length phonemically usually only distinguish between short vowels and long vowels. Very few languages distinguish three phonemic vowel lengths; some that do so are Estonian, Luiseño, and Mixe language. However, languages with two vowel lengths may permit words in which two adjacent vowels are of the same quality: Japanese ほうおう, , "phoenix", or Ancient Greek ἀάατος ,[Liddell, H. G., and R. Scott (1996). A Greek-English Lexicon (revised 9th ed. with supplement). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.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, , "you will facilitate it".
Related features
Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example,
French language long vowels are always in stressed syllables.
Finnish language, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length, which 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:
i-s o.
Among the languages with distinctive vowel length, there are some in which it may occur only in stressed syllables, such as in Alemannic German, Scottish Gaelic and Egyptian Arabic. In languages such as Czech language, Finnish language, some Irish dialects and Classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive also in unstressed syllables.
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: 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 that and some modern dialects ( taivaan vs. taivahan "of the sky"). Morphological treatment of is essentially similar to long vowels. Some old Finnish long vowels have developed into diphthongs, but successive layers of borrowing have introduced the same long vowels again so the diphthong and the long vowel now again contrast ( nuotti "musical note" vs. nootti "diplomatic note").
In Japanese, most long vowels are the results of the phonetic change of ; au and ou became ō, iu became yū, eu became yō, and now ei is becoming ē. The change also occurred after the loss of intervocalic phoneme . For example, modern Kyōto (Kyoto) has undergone a shift: . Another example is shōnen ( boy): .
Phonemic vowel length
As noted above, only a relatively few of the world's languages make a
phonemic distinction between long and short vowels. Some families have many such languages, examples being the Dravidian languages and the Finno-Ugric languages. Other languages have fewer relatives with vowel length, including
Arabic, Japanese,
Scottish Gaelic. There are also older languages such as
Ancient Greek,
Biblical Hebrew, and
Latin which have phonemic vowel length but no descendants that preserve it.
In Latin and Hungarian, some long vowels are analyzed as separate phonemes from short vowels:
| width="50%" valign="top" |
|}
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.[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.] 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 * saa+tta+k */sɑːtˑɑk/ "send (saatta-) +(imperative)", and the overlong 'aa' in saada comes from * saa+dak "get+(infinitive)". As for languages that have three lengths, independent of vowel quality or syllable structure, these include Dinka language, Mixe language, Yavapai language and Wichita language. An example from Mixe is "guava", "spider", "knot". In Dinka the longest vowels are three moras long, and so are best analyzed as overlong e.g. .
Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in Kikamba, there is , , , "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".
By language
In English
Contrastive vowel length
In many varieties of English, vowels contrast with each other both in length and in quality, and descriptions differ in the relative importance given to these two features. Some descriptions of Received Pronunciation and more widely some descriptions of English phonology group all non-diphthongal vowels into the categories "long" and "short", convenient terms for grouping the many vowels of English.
Daniel Jones proposed that phonetically similar pairs of long and short vowels could be grouped into single phonemes, distinguished by the presence or absence of phonological length (
chroneme).
The usual long-short pairings for RP are /iː + ɪ/, /ɑː + æ/, /ɜ: + ə/, /ɔː + ɒ/, /u + ʊ/, but Jones omits /ɑː + æ/. This approach is not found in present-day descriptions of English. Vowels show allophonic variation in length and also in other features according to the context in which they occur. The terms
tense (corresponding to
long) and
lax (corresponding to
short) are alternative terms that do not directly refer to length.
In Australian English, there is contrastive vowel length in closed syllables between long and short and . The following are of length:
Allophonic vowel length
In most varieties of English, for instance Received Pronunciation and
General American, there is
allophonic variation in vowel length depending on the value of the consonant that follows it: vowels are shorter before voiceless consonants and are longer when they come before voiced consonants.
Thus, the vowel in
bad is longer than the vowel in
bat . Also compare
neat with
need . The vowel sound in "beat" is generally pronounced for about 190 milliseconds, but the same vowel in "bead" lasts 350 milliseconds in normal speech, the voiced final consonant influencing vowel length.
Cockney English features short and long varieties of the closing diphthong . The short corresponds to RP in morphologically closed syllables (see thought split), whereas the long corresponds to the non-prevocalic sequence (see l-vocalization). The following are minimal pairs of length:
The difference is lost in running speech, so that fault falls together with fort and fought as or . The contrast between the two diphthongs is phonetic rather than phonemic, as the can be restored in formal speech: etc., which suggests that the underlying form of is (John Wells says that the vowel is equally correctly transcribed with or , not to be confused with ). Furthermore, a vocalized word-final is often restored before a word-initial vowel, so that fall out (cf. thaw out , with an intrusive r) is somewhat more likely to contain the lateral than fall . The distinction between and exists only word-internally before consonants other than intervocalic . In the morpheme-final position only occurs (with the vowel being realized as ), so that all is always distinct from or . Before the intervocalic is the banned diphthong, though here either of the vowels can occur, depending on morphology (compare falling with aweless ).
In Cockney, the main difference between and , and as well as and is length, not quality, so that his , merry and Polly differ from here's , Mary and poorly (see cure-force merger) mainly in length. In broad Cockney, the contrast between and is also mainly one of length; compare hat with out (cf. the near-RP form , with a wide closing diphthong).
"Long" and "short" vowel letters in spelling and the classroom teaching of reading
In the teaching of English, vowels are commonly said to have a "short" and a "long" version. The terms "short" and "long" are not accurate from a linguistic point of view—at least in the case of Modern English—as the vowels are not actually short and long versions of the same sound; the terminology is a historical holdover due to their arising from proper vowel length in
Middle English. The phonetic values of these vowels are shown in the table below.
In some types of phonetic transcription (e.g. pronunciation respelling), "long" vowel letters may be marked with a macron; for example, ⟨ā⟩ may be used to represent the IPA sound . This is sometimes used in dictionaries, most notably in Merriam-Webster
Origin
Vowel length may often be traced to assimilation. In Australian English, the second element of a diphthong has assimilated to the preceding vowel, giving the pronunciation of
bared as , creating a contrast with the short vowel in
bed .
Another common source is the vocalization of a consonant such as the voiced velar fricative or voiced palatal fricative or, in fact, an approximant (such as the typical realisation of the English diaphoneme /r/). A historically important example is the laryngeal theory, which states that long vowels in the Indo-European languages were formed from short vowels, followed by any one of the several "laryngeal" sounds of Proto-Indo-European (conventionally written h1, h2 and h3). When a laryngeal sound followed a vowel, it was later lost in most Indo-European languages, and the preceding vowel became long. However, Proto-Indo-European had long vowels of other origins 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 was created by the incomplete application of a rule extending 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. That too is exemplified by Australian English, whose contrast between (as in duck) and (as in dark) was brought about by a open vowel of the earlier .
Estonian, a Finnic language, has a rare phenomenon in which allophonic length variation has become phonemic after the deletion of the suffixes causing the allophony. Estonian had already inherited two vowel lengths from Proto-Finnic, but a third one was then introduced. For example, the Finnic imperative marker * -k caused the preceding vowels to be articulated shorter. After the deletion of the marker, the allophonic length became phonemic, as shown in the example above.
Notations
Latin alphabet
IPA
In the International Phonetic Alphabet the sign (not a colon, but two triangles facing each other in an
hourglass shape; Unicode ) is used for both vowel and consonant length. This may be doubled for an extra-long sound, or the top half () may be used to indicate that 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 "to get" (overlong)
- saada "send!" (long)
- sada "hundred" (short)
Although not phonemic, a half-long distinction can also be illustrated in certain accents of English:
- bead
- beat
- bid
- bit
Diacritics
-
Macron (ā), used to indicate a long vowel in Māori, Hawaiian, Samoan language, Latvian language and many transcription schemes, including romanizations for Sanskrit and Arabic, the Hepburn romanization for Japanese, and Yale for Korean language. While not part of their standard orthography, the macron is used as a teaching aid in modern Latin and Ancient Greek textbooks. Macron is also used in modern official Cyrillic orthographies of some minority languages (Mansi language,
-
(ă) are used to mark short vowels in several linguistic transcription systems, as well as in Vietnamese and Alvarez-Hale's orthography for O'odham.
-
Acute accent (á), used to indicate a long vowel in Czech language, Slovak language, Old Norse, Hungarian, Irish language, traditional Scottish Gaelic (for long oː ó, eː é, as opposed to ɛː è, ɔː ò) and pre-20th-century transcriptions of Sanskrit, Arabic, etc.
-
An apex, which was a light acute accent that was angled lower and aligned with a letter's right, was used in Classical Latin. (However, for I, a taller ꟾ was sometimes used instead.)
-
Circumflex (â), used for example in Welsh language. The circumflex is occasionally used as a surrogate for the macrons, particularly in Hawaiian and in the Kunrei-shiki romanization of Japanese, or in transcriptions of Old High German. In transcriptions of Middle High German, a system where inherited lengths are marked with the circumflex and new lengths with the macron is occasionally used.
-
Grave accent (à) is used in Scottish Gaelic, with a e i o u. (In traditional spelling, ɛː is è and ɔː is ò as in gnè, pòcaid, Mòr (personal name), while eː is é and oː is ó, as in dé, mór.)
-
Ogonek (ą), used in Lithuanian to indicate long vowels.
-
Trema (ä), used in Aymara language to indicate long vowels.
Additional letters
-
Vowel doubling, used consistently in Estonian, Finnish language, Lombard language, Navajo language and Somali language, and in closed syllables in Dutch language, Afrikaans, and West Frisian. Example: Finnish tuuli 'wind' vs. tuli 'fire'.
-
Estonian also has a rare "overlong" vowel length but does not distinguish it from the normal long vowel in writing, as they are distinguishable by context; see the example below.
-
Consonant doubling after short vowels is very common in Swedish language and other Germanic languages, including English. The system is somewhat inconsistent, especially in loanwords, around consonant clusters and with word-final nasal consonants. Examples:
- Consistent use: byta 'to change' vs bytta 'tub' and koma 'coma' vs komma 'to come'
- Inconsistent use: fält 'a field' and kam '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'.
[Carlo Porta on the Italian Wikisource]
-
ie is used to mark the long sound in German language because of the preservation and the generalization of a historic ie spelling, which originally represented the sound . In Low German, a following e letter lengthens other vowels as well, e.g., in the name Kues .
-
A following h is frequently used in German language and older Swedish language spelling, e.g., German Zahn 'tooth'.
-
In Czech language, the additional letter ů is used for the long U sound, and the character is known as a kroužek, e.g., kůň "horse". (It actually developed from the ligature "uo", which noted the diphthong until it shifted to .)
Other signs
-
Colon, , from Americanist phonetic notation, and used in orthographies based on it such as Oʼodham, Mohawk language or Seneca language. The triangular colon in the International Phonetic Alphabet derives from this.
-
Middot or half-colon, , a more common variant in the Americanist tradition, also used in language orthographies.
-
Saltillo (straight apostrophe), used in Miꞌkmaq, as evidenced by the name itself. This is the convention of the Listuguj orthography (Miꞌgmaq), and a common substitution for the acute accent (Míkmaq) of the Francis-Smith orthography.
No distinction
Some languages make no distinction in writing. This is particularly the case with ancient languages such as
Old English. Modern edited texts often use macrons with long vowels, however. Australian English does not distinguish the vowels from in spelling, with words like 'span' or 'can' having different pronunciations depending on meaning. Other modern languages that do not represent vowel length in their standard orthography include
Serbo-Croatian,
Slovene language and
Hausa language.
Other writing systems
In non-Latin writing systems, a variety of mechanisms have also evolved.
-
In abjads derived from the Aramaic alphabet, notably Arabic alphabet and Hebrew alphabet, long vowels are written with consonant letters (mostly approximant consonant letters) in a process called mater lectionis e.g. in Modern Arabic the long vowel is represented by the letter ا (Aleph), the vowels and are represented by و (wāw), and the vowels and are represented by ي (Yodh), 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 , 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, literally "bare e") 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.
-
Japanese phonology:
-
In the hiragana syllabary, long vowels are usually indicated by adding a vowel character after. For vowels , , and , 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 (usually 新潟, in kanji); う (u), りゅう "ryuu" (usu. 竜), dragon. The mid-vowels and may be written with え (e) (rare) (ねえさん (姉さん), neesan, "elder sister") and お (o) おおきい, 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.
-
Some analyses make a distinction between a long vowel and a succession of two identical vowels, citing pairs such as 砂糖屋 satōya 'sugar shop' vs. . They are usually identical in normal speech, but when enunciated a distinction may be made with a pause or a glottal stop inserted between two identical vowels.
-
In transcription: ts uki 'moon' vs. ts ūki 'airflow'.
-
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).
See also
External links
