>Yes. Syllable-final vowels and vowels before a single
>short word-final consonant are long if they are stressed.
This would seem to say that the length of a vowel is conditioned by context
and is not contrastive. Is that correct?
>Danish has both long and short vowels.
Then I've got to be about as dumb as it gets not to have noticed this. Can
you give me any minimal pairs?
>FWIW the Zagreb dialect of Croatian has apparently
>lost all distinctions of vowel length and tone
>quite traceless in all contexts. People just
>stopped to make the distinctions, or rather the
>younger speakers failed to acquire them.
This is good news. It would mean that I could simply drop the long vowels
at the appropriate stage of the language's development and not have to
apologize for it by turning them into something else (e.g.
diphthongs.) Doing things this way would not only be simpler (which is
nice), but it wouldn't do any violence to the shape of the modern words as
I have already conceived them - I wouldn't have to change the basic look
and feel of the language.
>>Long vowels without any geminate consonants is quite frequent.
In which case, I think that I will simply start the proto-language off with
long vowels and no geminate consonants. That way, I don't have to go to
the trouble of removing the geminate consonants later as well. (Unless I
decide that geminates would do nice things to the stress patterns in the
language before they are lost, but I think that that is throwing in a
wildcard that I probably don't want.)
Isidora