Re: How many vowel lengths are there

From: Ruud Harmsen (realemailseesite01_at_rudhar.com)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:33:34 +0200

13 Sep 2004 23:40:53 -0700: ranjit_mathews@yahoo.com (M. Ranjit
Mathews): in sci.lang:

>A Hungarian who lived in France for a time said that he wouldn't spell
>the French name Thoma with a long o. I was surprised by this because
>in Malayalam, Thoma is spelt with a long o and the French
>pronunciation sounds to me quite close to the Malayalam [t[OmA] spelt
>with 2 long vowels <O> and <A>.
>
>How many vowel lengths are there in common use, according to
>phoneticians?

Inifinitely many, to a phonetician. To a phonologist, the number is
much more limited. E.g. one in French (or zero, which is the same
thing in this sense, i.e. vowel length is not relevant), two in
Hungarian.

>How many of these vowel lengths are considered short and
>how many are considered long?

Depends on what role it plays in a given (variant of a) language.

When comparing languages, it start getting difficult. A Hungarian long
vowel is longer than a Hungarian short vowel (and sometimes it also
has a different timbre, in the case of a/á and e/é).
A Malayalam long vowel I suppose is longer than a Malayalam short
vowel. And yet it is quite possible that a French vowel (of
indifferent length, to French speakers) is perceived as long by a
Malayalam speaker, and as short by a Hungarian speaker.
At the same time, perhaps a Hungarian speaker may perceive the length
of Malayalam vowels corrrectly. Or maybe they do not.

Perhaps Malayalam is one of those languages that sound incredibly fast
to my ears? (I don't know if I ever heard it, but I may have heard
related languages). Perhaps is has short vowels and supershort vowels?
Hungarian sounds relatively slow to me. That may explain the
phenomenon.

I once had a theory that languages with few phonemes need to be spoken
faster than languages with many, in order to obtain the same
information density: in a language with few phonemes each of them is
more predictable, so its actual occurrence carries fewer bits of
information. But practical example don't support this: English,
Hungarian and Portuguese have roughly the same number of phonemes, but
only Portuguese sounds fast. Spanish has far fewer phonemes than
Portuguese, but both sound very fast. 

-- 
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com

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