Vowel length
In linguistic, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. While of relatively little importance in English, vowel length can be an important phonemic factor in many other languages including but not limited to Japanese, Thai and Latin.
Most languages distinguish only short vowels and long vowels, but Estonian and Wichita distinguish three vowel lengths.
Long vowels in English
English has long and short vowels, but they do not contrast strongly. English vowel length is fairly regular, however: vowels are long before voiced consonants in the coda of a syllable. For example, the vowel ([æ]) in [bæt] ("bat") is short, because /t/ is unvoiced, while the same vowel in [bæ:d] ("bad") is long, because /d/ is voiced.
English vowels can also be said to have natural length. [æ] is naturally long, before it is lengthened further by voiced consonants, while a vowel such as [I] is short. Vowel stress in English is also related to length, as [e], [i], [u], and other stressed vowels are also naturally long.
Notation
A large number of inventive solutions for noting vowel length have been devised. Note that many scripts, including some for languages where vowel length is phonemic, do not record vowel length at all.
Notations in the Latin alphabet
Several mechanisms for denoting vowel length are used in the Latin alphabet:
- Macron, used in Latin, Maori, Latvian and many transcription schemes (eg. Hepburn for Japanese). A vowel with a macron indicates a long vowel (kōtsū "traffic"), with macronless vowels being short (kotsu "bone").
- Circumflex, used unsystematically in Turkish for both vowel length and palatalization. As with acute accents, a vowel with an accent is long, with other vowels being short. The circumflex is occasionally used as a surrogate for the macrons, particularly in the Kunrei-shiki romanization of Japanese.
- Ring, used in two different language families:
- In Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, the long A sound can be represented with Å.
- In Czech, the character is known as a krouzek and is used for the long U sound, as in kůň "horse".
- Vowel doubling, used in Dutch, Estonian and Finnish. Two consecutive vowels (tuuli, "wind") indicate a long vowel, while a single vowel is short (tuli, "fire").
- Estonian also has a rare "overlong" vowel length, but does not distinguish this from the normal long vowel in writing.
- The long I in Dutch is written as "ie", not "ii".
- Colon, commonly used in IPA phonetic transcription but no native writing systems. Vowel length can also be signified by a half-colon (a colon with only the top dot), meaning half-long, and a double colon, meaning twice as long as a regular vowel.
Notations in other writing systems
In non-Latin writing systems, a variety of mechanisms have also evolved.
- In the Arabic alphabet, long vowels are written with their own letters, while short vowels are typically omitted entirely.
- In the Devanagari script used for Sanskrit and many related languages, long vowels can be indicated by affixing a vowel sign to the letter.
- In the Japanese hiragana syllabary, long vowels are indicated by adding vowel characters after a consonant-vowel characters.
- A long O or U is indicated by adding the hiragana character う (u), as in こうつう kōtsū "traffic" instead of こつ kotsu "bone".
- Note that the hiragana character お (o) is used instead in the comparatively rare cases where the long O is not part of a loanword from Chinese, such as おおきい ōkii "large".
- A long E or I is indicated by adding い (i), as in せんせい sensei "teacher" (pronounced [sen'se:]).
- Long A does not exist as such in native Japanese words, but can be rendered in hiragana by adding the character あ (a).
- In the Japanese katakana syllabary, all long vowels are indicated by adding the special bar character ー, as in コーツー kōtsū "traffic" instead of コツ kotsu "bone".
