IPA query

Mxsmanic makes these pronouncements with naught but the flimsiest scrap of fuzzy logic to support them.

"Vowel length is not phonemic in standard English, and so speakers of standard English ignore it; if they didn't, it would be much harder for them to communicate."

There is no logic here: none whatsoever. These speakers of Mxsmanic's "standard English" ignore vowel length, do they? At least Mxsmanic is not ignorant enough to fail to acknowledge that there are long vowel and short vowel (in most dialects).

Short vowels and long vowels exist in the speech of almost every native speaker. For them to exist they must be registered as either long or short, conciously or subconciously. Were vowel length really ignored, as Mxsmanic insists, how do you explain the persistence of this distinction?

Speakers of most English dialects don't ignore vowel length: if they did, surely the distinction would cease to be made. It is not ignored (in most dialects) but used consistently to help distinguish one vowel from the next. Far from making it harder to comunicate, the use of vowel length can only assist in the distinguishing of one vowel from another.

What I see as being closer to the truth is this. Both length and position help distinguish one phoneme from another. Maintaining the distinction between long and short vowels makes it easier for English speakers to communicate. Because of its usefulness the distinction between long and short vowels continues to be made by most English speakers.

"Speaking a language efficiently requires not only recognizing the phonemes but also ignoring anything that isn't phonemic." writes Mxsmanic. No, ignore the useful at your peril. Eye contact is not phonemic, do we ignore that? Such things as the distinction between long and short vowels may not be phonemic (in all dialects) but if they are useful, it's worth using them.

"It's not a matter of 'fine tuning,' it's a matter of distinguishing between phonemic and non-phonemic." writes Mxsmanic. What is he writing about here? Aussies are "finely tuned" for vowel length because it is phonemic in AusE. That's what I took Mick to have meant.

"If vowel length is phonemic for you, you are speaking a regional dialect of some type;" this is absolutely true, I don't deny this. However, we can equally say "If vowel length is not phonemic for you, you are speaking a regional dialect of some type." Everyone speaks a regional dialect of some type. The American midwest and the southeast of England are no less regions of the World than is Australia.

"If vowel length is phonemic for you, ... you can safely assume that there will be quite a few words that will be incomprehensible for you in standard English, or vice versa, when pronounced in isolation (because of conflicting sets of phonemes)."

Why do I get uneasy when Mxsmanic tells me I can safely assume something? I guess it might have to do with the great may unsafe assumptions we've seen him make so far. Assumptions like "Using conflicting sets of phonemes leads necessarily to incomprehensibly." Nonsense, when I hear an American say "possible" I don't think they're saying "passable".

This particular "safe" assumption of Mxsmanic's may be safe in the case of some fella living in a humpy out the back of Bourke who's never heard of electricity but it's time someone wake up and come back to the real World. Even Aussies (for whom vowel length is phonemic) have heard these accents which Mxsmanic likes to label "standard". We do listen to the wireless from time to time.

"In standard pronunciations of English, vowel length is not phonemic. If vowel length is phonemic for you, you are not using a standard English pronunciation. It's as simple as that."

He keeps harping on this notion of "standard English" is if it were all that need be bothered with. I'm not so much interested in Mxsmanic's standard English; I'd much rather discuss English.

Vowel length is phonemic in Australian and New Zealand English. Whether Mxsmanic sees fit to deem our English to be "standard" is of little interest to me. Where vowel length is not phonemic it is still important. It's definitely worth sparing the twenty minutes alerting ESL students to this distinction that (almost?) all of us make.

Every language has phonological conventions that are not phonemically significant. This is the case for English, in which some vowels are routinely lengthened and others routinely kept short depending upon their juxtaposition with other segments and other factors. However, vowel length does not serve to distinguish meaning; it is not phonemic.

A person who depends on vowel length as a phonemic marker will find that he cannot understand parts of the spoken English of speakers of the standard language, because they don't consistently use vowel length in a way that clearly demarcates meaning (vowel length not being phonemic for them). Conversely, a speaker of a non-standard dialect who uses vowel length exclusively to distinguish meaning (who makes length phonemic, in other words) will not be understood by many speakers of the standard language, because they pay no attention to vowel length and don't understand distinctions made with it.

Much of this is hidden in connected speech because context provides many clues; minimal pairs in complete utterances are rare and even if a fair number of phonemes are missed, the complete utterance may still be understandable because it forms no minimal pairs with other utterances even after masking the misunderstood phonemes.

Most of the phonological misunderstanding between speakers of, say, American English and British English is due to minor differences in the distribution of phonemes and differing sets of allophones for those phonemes. Fortunately, neither of these standard pronunciations makes vowel length phonemic. As I've said, vowel length has not been phonemic in English in centuries.

I specifically teach ESL students to ignore vowel length when listening, and I tell them that pronouncing vowel-length distinctions is optional when they speak (there are far more important distinctions to make than the non-phonemic distinctions of vowel length). Most of them will never go anywhere near Australia or New Zealand, so the particularities of a few dialects spoken in those areas are completely irrelevant and useless to learn.

<< the particularities of a few dialects spoken in those areas are completely irrelevant and useless to learn.>>

That's a pretty arrogant assumption.

Regular poster,

You'll tend to find a rather liberal sprinkling of arrogant assumptions amongst the words of this Mxsmanic.

Mxsmanic,

Using longer words does not make your logic any less flimsy. What are we doing now? Just finding new ways to make the same points we've been making for the last eight pages: flogging a dead horse.

"A person who depends on vowel length as a phonemic marker will find that he cannot understand parts of the spoken English of speakers of the standard language, because they don't consistently use vowel length in a way that clearly demarcates meaning (vowel length not being phonemic for them)." You write.

Sheer nonsense. We can understand the spoken English of speakers of what you call "the standard language". Firstly, we're well used to hearing these dialects even though we don't speak like this. Secondly, as you note, the distinction between long and short vowels still exists in these dialects if only as a non-phonemic phonological convention.

"Conversely, a speaker of a non-standard dialect who uses vowel length exclusively to distinguish meaning (who makes length phonemic, in other words) will not be understood by many speakers of the standard language, because they pay no attention to vowel length and don't understand distinctions made with it."

I believe that you'd also find that people are not as unfamiliar with Australian English as you like to imagine. Again the point being that you don't have to speak a given dialect to be able to understand it. Anyway, let's assume that your "standard English" speaker is unfamiliar with AusE or NZE. You're telling us that (s)he be completely oblivious to the fact that we're only following the same phonological conventions that they do? I need more convincing than your say-so.

These phonological conventions are worth observing even where they're not essential to distinguishing meaning. They still help. Get yourself a vowel chart and mark out the positions of all the monophthongs. Look how crowded it's got: room for confusion galore. Now take two more: one for the long and the other for the short. Much clearer, no?

"I specifically teach ESL students to ignore vowel length when listening, and I tell them that pronouncing vowel-length distinctions is optional when they speak ..." I can only express my sympathy for these mislead students and for their future ESL teachers who'll have to unteach them this nonsense.

"Most of them will never go anywhere near Australia or New Zealand," and as for the handful who do? What ... can they just go screw themselves?

My favorite mantra now is "vowel length is not phonemic in standard English"

This new mantra dramatically increases efficiency of my autogenic training.
It helps me to understand that the English language is an incognizable phenomenon and all the native speakers are just extraterrestrials whose way of thinking is inconceivable.

vowel length is not phonemic in standard English
standard length is not English in phonemic vowels
phonemic English is not long enough to have vowels
vowel standard is but is it English?
length is phonemic in English but is it in vowels?


I can finally get relief.

Well, we can quibble and go in circles over whether vowel length is phonemic or not in English (for Oceanians it is unquestionably: as attested by television, radio, people, etc,etc,etc....) The most important point of this discussion was that relating to >>Pronunciation for International Intelligibility<<

http://www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/internationalintelligibility.html

I'll quote the most pertitent section again and hopefully, we'll have closure:

"Vowel quanlity: vowel quality varies widely from one NS [native speaker] accent to another. However, the length differences between the vowels of English feature in all accents, and the long English vowels are very long in comparison with average vowel lengths in other languages. Because of this, the distinction between long and short vowels is more important than exact vowel quality, and should be clear in speech. With diphthongs, just as with pure vowels, length should be our main concern rather than exact quality.
...
Whilst not discouraging attempts to achieve good vowel quality, the core draws teachers’ and learners’ attention decisively towards the far more important issue of vowel length."

This article was originally published in ENGLISHTEACHING professional, Issue 21, October 2001. http://www.etprofessional.com/


THE END. THANK YOU.

In looking over transcripts of native speakers, I note that vowel quality is far more consistent from one accent to another than vowel length.

I guess they're the same set of transcripts which "proved" that vowel length is not phonemic in Australian English.

>> In looking over transcripts of native speakers, I note that vowel quality is far more consistent from one accent to another than vowel length. <<

For nearly all native speakers from all around the world, the /u/ sound in "would", "hood", "cook" is short, whereas the /u:/ sound in "wooed", "who'd" and "kook" is long. The only thing that makes these pronunciations DIFFERENT from one native speaker to another, is the vowel QUALITY. For this reason, we readily identify /u/ by its LENGTH, because speakers from America, England, Australia, etc., pronounce it with a different quality.

You can look at other vowels this way: /i:/ as in "feed", /Ou/ as in "show", /ei/ as in "way", /a:/ as in "farm": all are pronounced differently from one country to the next, but all are long -- especially the diphthongs.

There are variations in the vowel quality of /e/ as in "bed" (sometimes very open, sometimes very closed), /i/ as in bid (like a schwa in NZ), /^/ as in "bud" (no consistency at all from country to country), but all are short, relative to the long vowels.

There are of course a few rare exceptions and this is where intelligibility might break down.

I don't s'pose Mxsmenuc hes the trenscrupt of the Kiwi tillung us how he's go-ung to eat some fush end chups, drunk a sux peck of beer end after thet go to bid.

Very interesting discussion!
Just one thing, because German was mentioned somewhere: Germans mispronounce Hungarian "bor" as "por" because they don't have a real voiced-voiceless opposition with (in? on?) initial plosives, but rather one of aspirated/non-aspirated, the non-aspirated plosives being for most German-speaking people, especially for those from the south, quite voiceless. So they just can't produce a fully voiced "bor" as would be necessary for correct Hungarian, their unvoiced "b" sounding just like the Hungarian unaspirated "p". It has nothing to do with the quality of the preceding consonants, though there is a influence of the following ones - as is even more the case with (in?) English: When fortis consonants follow, a preceding vowel is shorter than when a lenis follows, e.g. plate/played, rope/robe.
As a student of English on a German university I was explicitly told that it's really the difference in vowel quantity which I should try to imitate, because that is the important and noticeable contrast, not the pronunciation of the final consonant.
BTW, in German linguistics the same discussion has been going on for decades now, whether it's the vowel quantity or the quality which is phonemic. In a stressed syllable, both features are important - in my opinion. Though different varieties of German all have more or less different vowel qualities, quantity is important in all of them. Pronouncing all vowels with roughly the same length - as people who speak French or Italian or Turkish usually do, where vowel length really doesn't matter - gives their German a strong foreign accent no native speaker would ever have and I suppose that would be the same with English (no matter which variety you try to speak).

opposition with (in? on?) initial plosives -- with
ore the case with (in?) English -- either with or in

I agree that both vowel quality and length are important in English.

There's a huge difference between speaking with an accent and simply being fully comprehensible. Most students want to be fully understood, but they don't care about their accents.

That's absolutely fair enough and all the more reason to get the length right instead of loosing sleep over any subtle difference in the relative positions of the vowels in "some" and "pslam" that you might find in this or that dialect.

The vowel position is important because it is phonemic, whereas vowel length is unimportant because it is not phonemic.