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In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration.In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Czech, Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), some Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish and Estonian), Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan ...
Among the languages that have distinctive length, there are only a few that have both distinctive vowel length and distinctive consonant length. It is more common that there is only one or that they depend on each other. The languages that distinguish between different lengths have usually long and short sounds.
Length: it is important to distinguish two aspects of vowel length. One is the phonological difference in length exhibited by some languages. Japanese, Finnish, Hungarian, Arabic and Latin have a two-way phonemic contrast between short and long vowels. The Mixe language has a three-way contrast among short, half-long, and long vowels. [31]
Short vowels lengthen in stressed open syllables. On account of the above, the vowel inventory changes from /iː i eː e a aː o oː u uː/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/, with pre-existing differences in vowel quality achieving phonemic status and with no distinction between original /a/ and /aː/. Additionally: Unstressed /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ merge into ...
The Classical vowel length system faded in later Latin and ceased to be phonemic in Romance, having been replaced by contrasts in vowel quality. Consonant length, however, remains contrastive in much of Italo-Romance, cf. Italian nono "ninth" versus nonno "grandfather". [47] Recording of ānus, annus, anus. A minimal set showing both long and ...
Even here the vowels can merge, but to a tense /eː/: [ˈbeːtn̩, ˈdeːnən, ˈzeːɡn̩]. [32] Scholars who question the existence of a phoneme /ɛː/ do so for the following reasons: The existence of a phoneme /ɛː/ is an irregularity in a vowel system that otherwise has pairs of long and tense vs. short and lax vowels such as /oː/ vs ...
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of chain shifts that affected historical long vowels but left short vowels largely alone. It is one of the primary causes of the idiosyncrasies in English spelling. The shortening of ante-penultimate syllables in Middle English created many long–short pairs. The result can be seen in such words as,
An example in Latin: Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit (Aeneid 1.1-2)The first syllable of the first word (arma) is heavy ("long by position") because it contains a short vowel (the A) followed by more than one consonant (R and then M)—and if not for the consonants coming after it, it would be light.