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

> > [snip]
> > 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.
>
Actually, most dialects of English do have an allophonic length
distinction in vowels that has absolutely nothing to do with tenseness and
laxness, but rather with the following consonant.  Before unvoiced
consonants vowels are short (in duration), while before voiced consonants
or finally the vowels are long.  For example:

beat [bit]
bead [bi:d]

bit [bIt]
bid [bI:d]

The difference is more obvious in the tense vowels.  There's also a rather
famous example of this phenomenen called "Canadian raising," where the
phonemic dipthong /ai/ actually changes in quality as well as
quantity.  The short-duration allophone is [Vi] while the long-duration
allophone is [ai]:

bite: [bVit]
bide:  [baid]

I'm sure these distinctions didn't help the confusion of an L1
Korean-speaker struggling with the bad descriptions of English teachers!


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"It is of the new things that men tire--of fashions and proposals and
improvements and change.  It is the old things that startle and
intoxicate.  It is the old things that are young."
-G.K. Chesterton _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_