Re: USAGE: Fänyläjikyl Inglyx

> Roland Hoensch
>
> Regarding cut and cot, the main difference seems to be the length of the
> vowel.  cUt being short, and cOt being middle-length.  I wish there was
> some way of properly representing these things... well, I'll try
> to find one anyways.  Difficult when English has three lengths.
> And it bat and bet I think the difference is also in the length.  Am I
> wrong?
IIRC, (a) length correlates more with stress & other aspects of prosody
than with the particular segment or segment type, (b) the tense vowels
tend, statistically, to be longer than the lax, (c) not all vowels of
the same class (tense or lax) are of the same average duration, (d)
phonologically, the primary significance of phonetic length is as
a distinguisher between syllable-final fortis and lenis phonemes,
e.g. [bEk] = /bek/, [bE:g] = /beg/.

That said, for particular phoneme pairs in particular accents, phonetic
length can be their primary distinguisher. E.g. for me,
    [b&d] 'bade'  [b&:d] 'bad';
    [bEd] 'bed',  [bE:d] 'bared';
    [bId] 'bid',  [bI:d] 'beard';
    [tok] 'took', [to:k] 'talk';
    [h%t] 'hut',  [h%:t] 'hurt'
    [pu] 'pull',  [pu:]  'pool'.
For Australian,
    [bad] 'bud',  [ba:d] 'bard'.

Conceivably -- I have not verified this -- I have a four-way phonetic
length distinction in these cases:
    [pIs] 'piss', [fI:s] 'fizz', [fI::s] 'fierce', [fI:::s] 'fears'
but whatever the phonetics, the phonology is straightforward.

--And.