Adrian Morgan wrote:
> Christophe Grandsire wrote, quoting Barry Garcia:
>
> > > With long simple vowels, are they just pronounced the same as the
> > > short ones, but drawn out longer? I'm always confused as to long and
> > > short vowels, because what I gather from English, it's not really the
> > > same
> >
> > Modern English doesn't really have an opposition between short and long
> > vowels, but between lax vowels, tense vowels and diphtongs. But it's
> > called short and long vowels for historical reasons.
>
> It's true that /i/ tends to be thought of as 'short' while /I/
> tends to be thought of as 'long'. This is because occurences of /I/ in
> many dialects of English _are_ almost always longer than occurences of
> /i/.
>
> bit [bit]
> beat [bI:t]
Really? I was taught to pronounce 'long i' /i/ and 'short i' /I/: bit /bIt/
and beat /bi:t/.
> But what of the opposition between /a/ and /a:/? In my (Australian)
> dialect, I don't believe there is any difference apart from length.
>
> father [fa:D@] Bart [ba:t] farm [fa:m]
> mother [maD@] but [bat] fun [fan]
father /fa:D@*/, Bart /ba:*t/, farm /fa:*m/
mother /mVD@*/ but /bVt/ and fun /fVn/
> In my dialect the word 'gone' is the only word in the language to
> contain a phoneme that appears to be /O:/. There *may* be a very subtle
> voice difference, but I cannot convince myself of it.
>
> gone [gO:n] -- no other word contains [O:]
gone /g@n/, /g@un/ and /goun/.
Luca
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>