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Vowel digraphs are those spelling patterns wherein two letters are used to represent a vowel sound. The ai in sail is a vowel digraph. Because the first letter in a vowel digraph sometimes says its long vowel sound, as in sail , some phonics programs once taught that "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking."
Tense vowels are distinguished from lax vowels with a "silent" e that is added at the end of words. Thus, a in hat is lax /æ/, but when e is added in the word hate a is tense /eɪ/. Heavy and tense-r vowels follow a similar pattern, e.g. ar in car is heavy /ɑːr/, ar followed by silent e in care is /ɛər/.
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 ...
Long vowels are written by adding the kana for that vowel, in effect doubling it. However, long ō may be written either oo or ou, as in とうきょう toukyou 'Tōkyō'. For dialects that do not distinguish ē and ei, the latter spelling is used for a long e, as in へいせい heisei 'Heisei'.
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,
In the approach used by the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, Wells [81] claims that consonants syllabify with the preceding rather than following vowel when the preceding vowel is the nucleus of a more salient syllable, with stressed syllables being the most salient, reduced syllables the least, and full unstressed vowels ("secondary stress ...
The Great Vowel Shift was a fundamental change in late Middle English (post-Chaucer) and Early Modern English that affected the pronunciation of all of the long vowels. The high vowels /iː/ and /uː/ were diphthongized, ultimately producing the modern diphthongs /aɪ̯/ and /aʊ̯/, and all other vowels were raised.
A short diphthong had the same length as a short single vowel, and a long diphthong had the same length as a long single vowel. [125] As with monophthongs, their length was not systematically marked in Old English manuscripts, but is inferred from other evidence, such as a word's etymological origins or the pronunciation of its descendants.