Re: Phonemic vowel and consonant length.

On 2003.02.02 15:51 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?
Not a useful answer, but my theory is if you can think of it, some
language out there's done it ten-times worse already, so it wouldn't
suprise me. (Even if languages with 40 contrastive vowels are hard
enough to find, let alone 40 different lengths... :) Are there any
languages with 40 contrastive vowels (incl. diphthongs)? What language
has the most vowels, and are more vowels often accompanied by more or
less consonants? (which one? :P) And vice-versa: do languages with few
vowels have a mere handful of consonants, or do they make up for the
lack? Or are there no generalisations that can be made?)
> 2. I heard tell that Old Japanese lacked a phonemic vowel length
> distinction, but modern Japanese does--I may be wrong, but I'm sure
> there's a language somewhere that's gained the contrast somehow, where
> there was none before. How would this come about?
In addition to loss of consonants mentioned previously, a popular way
of doing it is by monophthongising diphthongs. Australian English also
did it by having the vowel formerly known as /V/ (which was lax) (the
HUT vowel) and the vowel formerly known as /A/ (which was tense) (the
non-rhotic HEART vowel) take over the same space leading to [6] vs
[6:], so having a tense--lax distinction may help as well, if the tense
vowels are realised longer than the lax ones.

Tristan.

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