phonology

Question

hi everybodyi have something to ask that is related to phonology.long vowels are the long type of short vowels. if this is right, why is the long vowel marks are different from the short vowel marks?for example the vowel of ( beat) is the long form of the vowel in ( bid) but the marks( except for the dots ) are different.thanks...

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

Anonymouslong vowels are the long type of short vowels

Not at all: they are different sounds. The mouth positions for the vowel sounds of beat and bid are quite different; that is why they are marked differently.

CalifJim · Answer

Anonymouslong vowels ... short vowels ...

When applied to vowels in English, "long" and "short" do not refer to length of time. The correct terms are "tense" and "lax", and each can be sustained for as long or short a time as you wish. The diacritic marks that are used to indicate "long" ("tense") and "short" ("lax") are completely arbitrary. A completely different diacritic mark could have been chosen for each and every vowel. The marks that are usually chosen are reflective more of the orthography of English than the phonology, so many systems show a 'long' and a 'short' form of each vowel graph a, e, i, o, u. Thus "beat" is said to have a "long e", but "bid" is said to have a "short i".

CJ

Raindoctor · Answer

Phonemic length is a feature of some languages. And it was a feature of Old English and Middle English. Modern English does not have long and short vowels; that is, there is no phonemic length in Modern English.

What happened to long vowels of Middle English? Well, some became diphthongs, some became close vowels (like in FLEECE, GOOSE). However, the orthography gives clues about historically long vowels. For instance, look at the word 'beat', which has digraph. This digraph represented a vowel between and in the vowel space. It represented a long open e, which is like /?:/. Historically long vowels went through the great vowel shift; however, short vowels did not.

So, the path majority of words with /?:/ took is this: /??/ > /e?/ > /i?/, thats why we hear the vowel we hear in words like 'beat, cheat, bead'. In a few words like 'steak, break', this long vowel shifted differently: /??/ > /e?/ > /e?/

Sure, the vowel in modern 'beat' vowel is longer than that in the word 'bid'. Besides this quantitative difference, there is a qualitative difference as well: the 'bid' vowel is lower than, not as tense as, the 'beat' vowel. Here, tenseness has to do with tongue tensing.

Merriam Webster uses historically long and short vowels to represent modern sounds. This is due to a couple of reasons: (a) to reduce the number of symbols to use; (b) to represent historical connection.

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