1229: Where Long Vowels (may) Originate Apr 21, 2018

English does not distinguish phonetically between long and short vowels, but plenty of other languages such as Hebrew do. There is still some level of mystery about how long vowels develop, though for that matter, there is no one reason that short vowels should be presumed to be a constant nor a default. One theory as to why Hebrew developed long vowels is that in many words with glottal stops, the glottal stop was lost which left either two of the same vowel next to each other (which is essentially what a long vowel is) or otherwise the first vowel was assimilated into the second (vocalic elision), and this would result in the latter vowel lengthening. For instance, the word שעונים /ʃeʔo'nim/ loses the glottal stop and becomes [ʃoː'nim] (the ː represents a long vowel). This would not explain vowel length for every language, and especially not the middle length in languages like Mixe.