Talk:Length (phonetics)

Obscure passage

I'm copy pasting the following to this talk page. It was added to the section pointing out that in "certain languages, however, there are pairs of sounds that are traditionally considered to be long-short pairs of the same sound even though they really consist of different sounds":

"This is particular problematic when the speakers of such languages cannot hear the distinction, e.g. English /ou/ vs. /o/ or /o:/ in other languages."

-- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈæ̞wːæ̞ː} 08:18, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

Circular definition

In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that are distinctively longer than other sounds.

This begs the question: what does "longer" mean here? Are we talking about duration, or something more subtle? --Doradus (talk) 14:17, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Clicking through to other articles, it does seem that duration is the key. I've reworded the opening sentence accordingly. --Doradus (talk) 14:20, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Terms for these symbols: ː and ˑ

The article says this symbol, ː , is called a length sign. What do you call this one: ˑ ? A half-length sign? Could the name be added to the article? DBlomgren (talk) 17:49, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Long consonants

There needs to be more discussion about what that even means. /t/ is an an abrupt sound. Is /tː/ possible? Does it just indicate a trailing short vowel? Does it indicate that the preceding and succeeding syllable have separate enunciated /t/s? or what? See, e.g., Kuujjuaq which claims that the name has a /jː/. Is the "yyyyuh" stretched out? The "yuuuuuuh" stretched out? or is the sound simply repeated "...yeh-yuh..."? — LlywelynII 05:32, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

⌈ It means that the consonant is held for longer. For plosives (like t), this means there is a longer time between starting to pronounce the plosive (getting the mouth into the position, but then waiting) and releasing it -- so yes, [a.t:a] is very much possible, and audibly well-distinct from [a.ta]. It is not per se connected to vowel length, there are languages like inuktitut or finnish where a long vowel may occur before a long consonant (e.g. finnish `taakka'), but in other languages there may be phonotactic rules preventing a geminate consonant after a long vowel. For other consonants like m or j, the consonant is audible, but not released, for a longer time than the simple consonant. So your /a.j:a/ is approximately ayyyya, where the `y'-consonant is strechted out, but there is no little stop in there (so it's not ayeh-ya). When gemination is mentioned, it is typically phonemic, so simply pronouncing the consonant as short makes a difference. For example: arabic [ka.ta.ba] means `he wrote' while [ka.t:a.ba] means `he dictated/made sb. write' or finnish ['ta.k:a] `fireplace' vs. ['ta.ka] `rear, backside'

If you have never encountered a language with gemination, it probably sounds mainly like rhythmic speech (and really it is), which you hopefully do not doubt is possible. ⌋ Canaron (talk) 14:54, 8 September 2019 (UTC)