Re: Phonemic vowel and consonant length.

At 8:51 PM -0800 2/1/03, Steven Williams wrote:
>I've a few questions that've been eating away at my soul for a while. So...
>
>1. I know Estonian has three degrees of phonemic vowel length, as did a few
>dialects of Sanskrit. How common is this three-tiered vowel length
>distinction? Are there any languages with _more_ than three levels of length?
Trubetskoy, in his _Grundzüge der Phonologie_, also made the claim that Hopi has a
three-way vowel distinction between long, short, and extra-short. He reanalyzed
it as the interaction of two separate distinctions: length and syllable
contact. Short vowels occur in syllables with loose contact, while extra-short
syllables occur in syllables with close contact. (Long vowels only occur in
open syllables, which are by definition, in loose contact.)

More recent analyses of Hopi phonology have not mentioned a three-way vowel length contrast.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson