795: Long and Short Vowels Feb 10, 2017

For someone speaking about American English vowels being either long or short, while most people can understand this what is intended, it is not accurate. Some languages like Old English, Latin, or Finnish do have comparatively short and long vowels, allowing for poetic meter to be measured in the total the amount of time it takes to say a line, with long vowels taking twice as long to utter. Some, but very few, languages have three phonemically separate lengths, such as Mixe spoken in Mexico. What have American English does have that's often confused with length is stress, which is used in a similar manner to length in terms of poetry, but does not relate to comparative amounts of time to say each syllable; this is almost always what someone will mean talking about long and short sounds in American English, though in some other dialects of English length does factor in phonetically. Sometimes the position of certain allophones such as the t in /kæt/ 'cat' will make the vowel appear longer than in other words like, /æpl̩/ 'apple' but this is because of the unvoiced consonant, t, not because of natural, comparative length.