Re: Droppin' D's Revisited

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]

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]

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:]

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