Re: USAGE: English vowel transcription [Re: Droppin' D's Revisited]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, dirk elzinga wrote:

> There are two traditions for transcribing the distinction between
> English "long" (or tense) and "short" (or lax) vowels. The first may
> be termed "qualitative" and distinguishes tense and lax vowels based
> on their phonetic quality. Hence, tense [i] and lax [I]. The second
> tradition may be termed "quantitative". Quantitative systems
> represent tense vowels by by adding an additional symbol to the
> character used to represent lax vowels. This additional symbol may be
> the length mark [i:], a copy of the vowel [ii], or a glide [ij/iy]. Of
> course a hybrid system which distinguishes both quality and quantity
> is possible (and which seems to be the one you use): lax [I], tense
> [i:].
>
> I lean towards a qualitative transcription, although I will often add
> a glide to a non-low tense vowel if the context demands clarification
> of weight/length properties.
>
>         lax     tense
>         [I]     [iy]
>         [E]     [ey]
>         [U]     [uw]
>         [O]*    [ow]
<blink>  So *that's* what the stupid long/short vowel thing was all about?

Okay, okay, it isn't stupid, but "long" and "short" vowels were presented
to me in kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade as if they were obvious from
listening to the vowel, which to me they weren't.  I had a bad tendency
to get them backwards.  :-(  (And for the record, I was accelerated a
year in English those grades, so it wasn't just bad English.  <G>)

I'm not sure the tense/lax distinction would've made sense to me at that
age, but I'm betting it would've made more sense than what sounded like a
vowel-duration distinction that I couldn't figure out.

YHL