Re: How many vowel lengths are there

From: M. Ranjit Mathews (ranjit_mathews_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: 14 Sep 2004 15:38:50 -0700

Ruud Harmsen <realemailseesite01@rudhar.com> wrote in message news:<4k7dk0d6ipfrers7t0id66v2l2g8gi8kc1@4ax.com>...
> 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.

How do they describe their length to other phoneticians? In multiples
of time taken to utter an English schwa or some such unit of
measurement?

> >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.

They can correctly perceive the length of Indian vowels put perhaps
not always their quality, but it appears that Malayalis can't perceive
the length of short Hungarian vowels correctly. Some occurrences of
Hungarian short vowels sound short to me and others sound long.

> 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?

No distinction between short and supershort. Perhaps lax and tense
short but this seems to change quality, not length. There are 5 long
vowels; their short counterparts have the duration of an English schwa
and a quality similar to that of their long counterparts. There are 6
short vowels; foreigners might find it difficult to tell 2 of them
apart at the end of words - one with the quality of [@] and one with
the quality of a turned m.

> 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.

Ah! I had to learn to introduce a hiatus between words when speaking
English. It seemed so odd to have to pause for no good reason.

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