# Is vowel length phonemic in English?



## Dymn

Taking a look at the English vowel inventory one wonders if length distinction is really phonemic in English, that is, if there are any vowels solely distinguished by quantity/length.

Unlike German or Latin, where each vowel has a clear long counterpart (which may have some difference in quality but still), in English the relationship between "short" and "long" vowels seems to be very fuzzy ever since the Great Vowel Shift, to the point each vowel pair has drifted apart in many ways, including diphthongization for some long vowels.

Also, I've often seen English speakers parodying non-native accents, by writing "short _i_'s" as <ee>, indicating that a plain short /i/ sounds like a "long _i_" to them. I've never seen the opposite.

Could we analyze "vowel length" as an incidental, non-phonemic, feature in English? Is there free variation to some degree? I've often seen the _thought _vowel transcribed as /ɔː/ in RP but /ɔ/ in GA. Does that show vowel length is hazy in English?

Thanks


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## Hulalessar

Whilst some varieties of English may have it, phonemic vowel length is difficult to find in the Received Pronunciation variety of spoken Standard English English. The fact you have to ask the question goes a long way to confirming it. If you look at any chart of RP vowels in the IPA you will not find any symbol both with and without the vowel-lengthening colon.


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## merquiades

There may well be varieties where the difference of vowel length is what is most important, but in mine, at least, it is not.  Short vowels can be lengthened and long vowels shortened.  The quality of the vowel is what counts.  For example, a native English speaker might write "feesh" to imitate the French pronunciation of "fish" even if that "feesh" is short.  What he is saying is he didn't here the /ɪ/ he was expecting and heard the other vowel sound.  I have seen non-native learners become frustrated because they haven't picked up there is more of a difference in quality than length and are misunderstood by natives.  The other day I heard a famous French non-native pronounce "hop" as "hope" and no one understood him.


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## sound shift

Dymn said:


> Does that show vowel length is hazy in English?


In my own speech, it is not.
For example, I always produce a long vowel in "need", never a short one; I always produce a short vowel in "met", never a long one; etc.


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## berndf

Hulalessar said:


> The fact you have to ask the question goes a long way to confirming it. If you look at any chart of RP vowels in the IPA you will not find any symbol both with and without the vowel-lengthening colon.


That doesn't mean much. In both Latin and German, _a_ (plus _ä_ in German) is the only vowel with roughly the same quality long and short. And even there I think it is not entirly appropriate. If you pronounce a German short _a_ with the quality of _a_ long a it sounds weird.

If you take Latin or German as a paradigm for Languages with phonemic vowel length then the definition should be: _a language with phonemic vowel length has separate vowel grids for long and short vowels with a system of correspondences, which is not necessarily bijective._


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> That doesn't mean much. In both Latin and German, _a_ (plus _ä_ in German) is the only vowel with roughly the same quality long and short. And even there I think it is not entirly appropriate. If you pronounce a German short _a_ with the quality of _a_ long a it sounds weird.
> 
> If you take Latin or German as a paradigm for Languages with phonemic vowel length then the definition should be: _a language with phonemic vowel length has separate vowel grids for long and short vowels with a system of correspondences, which is not necessarily bijective._


Do these German vowels sound right to you?  It gives the impression there is a big difference between long and short.


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> Do these German vowels sound right to you?  It gives the impression there is a big difference between long and short.


Where I am now, I can't listen to them, but yes, there differences are substantial. E.g., the Difference between the vowels of _p*u*t _and _p*oo*l _is the difference between short and long _u_ in German and the difference between the vowels of _b*i*n _and _b*ea*n _is the difference between short and long _i_ in German. The late Middle English vowel system was very similar to the German one (except for the umlauts) and the different pronunciations of vowels like the _i_ in _n*i*ght _and _n*i*l_ are reflexes for former long and short _i_s.

When I say the vowel grid itself depends on the length then this indeed goes as far as saying that the vowel quality is perceived differently when pronounced long and short. When you shorten a long _o_ it would be perceived as a short _u_ and not as a short_ o_ and when you shorten a long _e_ it would be perceived as a short _i_ and not as a short_ e_. This effect caused the long _e_/short _i_ and long _o_/short _u_ mergers in Vulgar Latin when it lost phonemic vowel length.


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## iezik

Dymn said:


> I've often seen the _thought _vowel transcribed as /ɔː/ in RP but /ɔ/ in GA.


The dictionaries usually try to give additional information. Some vowels are typically pronounced longer and some sounds are typically shorter. So, all longer vowels are marked as such. GA has less length differences between vowels than RP, so RP is with length and GA is without.

Several different transcriptions are all fine. Have you read Handbook of the IPA? In the version that I read, there are three examples of transcription of the same English text. So, the same text can be transcribed in different ways.

The set of sounds as used in dictionaries is not limited to phonemes. An online example is for OALD and similar tables are for others.  The English dictionaries thus use  /iː/, /ɪ/, and /i/ where the first two are phonemes and the last one is not. Phonemes are useful tools with limitations: The sounds of a language cannot be divided into phonemes for all the purposes. And there doesn't appear to exist a procedure for determining the set of phonemes that would fit all the needs and tastes.



Dymn said:


> Taking a look at the English vowel inventory one wonders if length distinction is really phonemic in English, that is, if there are any vowels solely distinguished by quantity/length.



The typical answer is that only /ɜː/ and /ə/ take about the same place at vowel chart, all the other sounds have their own place. Few examples with nice pictures are here or search for "vowels chart english formants".

Do you mean "recognized by humans or by a computer" with the word "distinguished"? Humans can distinguish vowels based on time,  sound color (formant frequencies or sound spectrum), power (loudness). Computers do similarly, for example using 39 measurements (power at 13 different frequencies, multiplied by 3 different time spans). In this sense, the same recognition capabilities can be used for all the languages. When recognizing, the question thus becomes irrelevant as length is anyway only one of inputs.


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## Loob

My answer is "No: vowel length is not phonemic in English".


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## Dymn

berndf said:


> If you take Latin or German as a paradigm for Languages with phonemic vowel length then the definition should be: _a language with phonemic vowel length has separate vowel grids for long and short vowels with a system of correspondences, which is not necessarily bijective._


Maybe it's too strict a condition then, although most of length-distinguishing languages seem to have this kind of symmetric approach. Perhaps if two vowel phonemes have systematically different lengths regardless of position and quality (e.g. _food _and _good_), then such language can be said to be length-distinguishing.

The question then is if English (or each of its several varieties) does really pronounce "long vowels" longer than "short vowels", or if free variation occurs and the "long"-"short" analysis is just a convention kept by inertia from former times (?). I admit I've never read anything about it, but things I've commented in my OP have left made me doubt...


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## sound shift

Is the vowel in "fool" longer than the vowel in "full"? Yes.
Can we give the one the pronunciation of the other, without impeding understanding? No.


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## merquiades

sound shift said:


> Is the vowel in "fool" longer than the vowel in "full"? Yes.
> Can we give the one the pronunciation of the other, without impeding understanding? No.


Really???  Which one of the two is longer for you?  I hardly make a difference



Dymn said:


> The question then is if English (or each of its several varieties) does really pronounce "long vowels" longer than "short vowels", or if free variation occurs and the "long"-"short" analysis is just a convention kept by inertia from former times (?). I admit I've never read anything about it, but things I've commented in my OP have left made me doubt...


  It's convention.  In school we always learn short and long vowels in the context of spelling, for example the "a" in _rate _is long because it ends in a silent -e so when you add an ending it will have one consonant: _ rating_.  _Chat _ends in a consonant so the vowel is short and you have to double it when there is an ending:  _chatting.  _That's how we get a feel for how the words we hear will be written.  But I don't think anyone ever explained it was about vowel length or that the vowels were related to one another beyond the fact that 2 sounds used the same letter;  long and short  a, e, i, o, u.  The monolingual dictionaries we used showed the pronunciation of words with macrons and breves to show if the vowel was short or long.


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## iezik

Dymn said:


> The question then is if English (or each of its several varieties) does really pronounce "long vowels" longer than "short vowels", or if free variation occurs and the "long"-"short" analysis is just a convention kept by inertia from former times (?).



Short answer: RP yes.

The same vowel can have very different length depending on environment:

_see_ 0.317 secs.
_seed_ 0.252
_seen_ 0.199
_seat_ 0.124
_seating_ 0.087

But different vowels still consistenly differ, e.g. few words and times (milliseconds) from Gimson that are pairs or near pairs:
leave 300, live 186
lead 285, lid 147
lean 195, limb 110
leaf 130, tiff 83
leap 123, lip 75

So, in RP, /iː/ is longer than /ɪ/, if compared within the same environment.


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## iezik

This seems like a confirmation of dialectal differences.


sound shift said:


> Is the vowel in "fool" longer than the vowel in "full"? Yes.



Sound shift is from RP area with different lengths.



merquiades said:


> Really???  Which one of the two is longer for you?  I hardly make a difference



Merquiades is from GA area without different lengths.


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## merquiades

iezik said:


> Merquiades is from GA area without different lengths.


No, I probably speak some version of Mid-Atlantic American English.  What they call GA is the Midwest.  The final -l is what blurs the two words for me.  In _food_ and _foot_ I make a clear difference but it's not based on length.


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## berndf

sound shift said:


> Is the vowel in "fool" longer than the vowel in "full"? Yes.
> Can we give the one the pronunciation of the other, without impeding understanding? No.





merquiades said:


> Really??? Which one of the two is longer for you? I hardly make a difference


As a speaker of a language where phonemic vowel length is a very prominent feature, hear a radical difference between British (RP) and American English. While RP speakers generally use vowel lengths very precisely and consistently as I would in my language, American speakers often vary vowel length for prosodic reasons. Something like the New England _not-naught_ merger wood be impossible in RP even if a speaker would use the same quality for both vowels because of the unmistakable quantity separation of the two vowels.


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## merquiades

berndf said:


> As a speaker of a language where phonemic vowel length is a very prominent feature, hear a radical difference between British (RP) and American English. While RP speakers generally use vowel lengths very precisely and consistently as I would in my language, American speakers often vary vowel length for prosodic reasons. Something like the New England _not-naught_ merger wood be impossible in RP even if a speaker would use the same quality for both vowels because of the unmistakable quantity separation of the two vowels.


I recognize very long vowels in those clips of Margaret Thatcher et al addressing parliament. Oh dear me!  But travelling around England last summer I didn't hear a lot of people speaking this way. The German vowels I sent you seem clearly long and short with length being the only difference. It's easier to hear them than make the difference. There seem to be cads of minimum pairs for each pair of vowels.
Not and naught are different for me but it's not length. Naught is more rounded and tense than not.


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## sound shift

merquiades said:


> Really???  Which one of the two is longer for you?  I hardly make a difference.


"Fool" is the longer for me.



merquiades said:


> I recognize very long vowels in those clips of Margaret Thatcher et al addressing parliament. Oh dear me!  But travelling around England last summer I didn't hear a lot of people speaking this way. The German vowels I sent you seem clearly long and short with length being the only difference. It's easier to hear them than make the difference. There seem to be cads of minimum pairs for each pair of vowels.
> Not and naught are different for me but it's not length. Naught is more rounded and tense than not.


No, not a lot of people speak like Margaret Thatcher did (thankfully), but I hear differences in vowel length from everyone I know. Admittedly, the difference in quantity sometimes comes with a difference in quality. This is true of my pronunciation of "not" and "naught": the latter doesn't just use a different vowel, it's longer too (and this is not just an RP matter; it's true for most people in England).


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## berndf

merquiades said:


> I recognize very long vowels in those clips of Margaret Thatcher et al addressing parliament. Oh dear me!


Oh dear me does not contain any short vowel. Prosodically lengthening long vowels even more is OK in languages with phonemic vowel length. The important thing is not to shorten long vowels and not to lengthen short vowel. I cannot recall a single time hearing an RP speaker lengthening the vowel in _some_ or _much_ while I often hear that from American speakers.



merquiades said:


> with length being the only difference


I still can't listen to the recordings but if that were so, they would be utterly wrong. There are significant quality differences between the long and short vowel pairs (ignoring _a_ an _ä _-- there it is a bit more complicated).

I am still not convinced if the existing length differentiations in English should qualify calling them phonemic rather than phonetic. English is lacking a system of vowel pairs that are perceived as long/short counterpart of one another. It just has some vowels that need to be shorter than others. In RP there are just more of them than in AmE, where length is important in minimal pairs like _bed-bad_.


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## gburtonio

Geoff Lindsey argues (quite convincingly, in my opinion) here that modern RP (or SSE, or NRP, or whatever you want to call it) does indeed have some vowel pairs distinguished only by length, but they're not the ones that have traditionally been put together as short/long pairs. He suggests that the following have the same quality but different length:

commA (i.e. schwa) and NURSE
DRESS and SQUARE
KIT and NEAR

The question of schwa/NURSE has been debated for a while and it seems it might purely be the idea that schwa doesn't appear in stressed syllables that stops people transcribing NURSE with /əː/. I (RP speaker) have always had the sensation that I have a certain amount of tongue tension when pronouncing NURSE so I am not totally convinced of this. (At the same time, I am aware that I often pronounce 'just' with a schwa even when stressed.)

As for SQUARE and NEAR now being monophthongs, I am pretty much convinced of this in the case of younger speakers. I'm in my thirties and I think I have a certain amount of variation, especially with NEAR, in how I realise the vowels – sometimes for me they are diphthongs centring to schwa, other times they are monophthongs. I'd say with SQUARE it's nearly always a monophthong for me.


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## Hulalessar

I think the vowels sounds in _square _and _near_ in SSE have been diphthongs for a good while. I have a book, first published 1950 and revised 1967, which gives them as diphthongs. So we are going back at least 50 years to when an academic regarded the fact as established for SSE. Does it not in fact go back to when SSE became non-rhotic?

Schwa and the vowel in _nurse_ certainly sound quite close.


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## gburtonio

Hulalessar said:


> I think the vowels sounds in _square _and _near_ in SSE have been diphthongs for a good while. I have a book, first published 1950 and revised 1967, which gives them as diphthongs. So we are going back at least 50 years to when an academic regarded the fact as established for SSE. Does it not in fact go back to when SSE became non-rhotic?
> 
> Schwa and the vowel in _nurse_ certainly sound quite close.



Absolutely. But the point is that more recently they have lost their schwa element and become long monophthongs.

[edit: sorry, realised I had caused your confusion by writing 'diphthongs' rather than 'monophthongs' in my earlier post – have changed]


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