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Comment by ScottBurson | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the time a native French speaker asked me if I had ever tried ... and here he said a word that I'll transcribe as "balling"; the first syllable was quite short and the vowel only slightly rounded. Anyway, I didn't recognize it. After a little back-and-forth I finally got what he was talking about, and said, "Oh, BOWLing."

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If you sampled a population of English speakers, I wonder how many would know that vowel length is really important to sound correct?

  Loose, lose
  Rack, rag
  Can’t, cunt
  Safe, save
  Ride, write

Have a go a shortening the vowel when it is long in the examples above and feel how wrong it sounds.

I like this discussion because it shows how regional the problem is: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/4h7w4o/phonemi...

I also like that vowel length is actually variable:

  see 317ms
  seed 252
  seen 199
  seat 124
  seating 87

  leave 300, live 186
  lead 285, lid 147
  lean 195, limb 110
  leaf 130, tiff 83
  leap 123, lip 75

I'm British and only learnt this after studying Japanese which encodes vowel length in its writing system, eg, uncle: おじさん, grandfather: おじいさん. I refused to believe that English had vowel length, and was shocked to learn that my ears are actually very capable of hearing it. The other classic example in English is "merry" versus "Mary", but I couldn't find a whole sentence that is distinguished merely by a vowel length, so I made one (at least for my non-rhotic British accent):

    Look how many clothes he shared!
    Look how many clothes he shed!

It really depends on your dialect (idiolect?). If you are ocker*, kiwi, or yarpie then vowel length may matter because there can be words with the same vowel sound where only the vowel length changes the meaning. English in Northern England also has vowel length rules (although presumably not often confusing since most speakers are very familiar with English as spoken in the rest of the country).

In New Zealand, can’t and cunt have the same vowel sound, and foreigners can make embarrassing or hilarious errors!

Shed and shared have different vowel sounds in my accent (shared rhymes with ear or air - a diphthong?).

Yes. I have learned that r following a vowel in British English tends to vanish. I remember reading about the pun in the title of Waugh in Africa when I was in my twenties and wondering what the pun was since in my Midwestern American English, Waugh and war are very different sounding words. I encountered a similar one later where a writer friend from England had a scene where a character expressed confusion about pawn shop vs porn shop.

>pawn shop vs porn shop

That one has happened to me IRL.

As a NZer I got thrown when going to California, by asking the front desk staff to do something and then waiting patiently when they said "I can't do that". Turns out when you come from a place where there's a vowel difference between "can" and "can't", that's what you listen for. I didn't at all pick up on the "t" sound at the end.

Here's an American saying and explaining the spoken difference between can and can't:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o_GHV6RTy9c

I agree, it certainly sounds queer to my ear. She says can't has a short vowel, whereas in NZ English it is important that the vowel length is spoken long.

Huh, most of the words pairs you listed have extremely distinct consonant differences, but not very distinct vowel length to my ear (which is pretty influenced by southern appalachian english). Ie, "loose" is a "s" sound, and "lose" is a "z" sound, "ck" is much harder than "g", same with "f" vs "v" and "d" vs "t". None of those words sound awkward when shortened to me, they just sounded like they were being spoken faster for some reason (for emphasis or pacing reasons). So I wouldn't consider those different due to simple vowel length differences, but due to core phoneme differences. I do see that the people in that thread who combine "muck" and "mug" are from New England, so maybe those are specific to that accent.

There are words which I do pronounce the "same" as each other - but do actually vary them on on length alone. These are mostly for "merged" words.

Ie:

"Mary" - longer sound on the "a" vowel than the "ry" sound

"Merry" - longer sound is the "ry" sound

"Marry" - is said like "Mary" except the "a" sound is even longer. "ry" sound is same length.

Part of me also wonders if the southern "drawl", where vowel sounds are extended, is actually a weird way of standardizing vowel length times across distinct phonemes. Though I wouldn't be surprised if there's still variation there too, but it would certainly be interesting to compare.

Do pronounce ‘riding’ and ‘writing’ the same, or is the first longer?

The only difference I have with those two is in the consonant (/d/ vs /t/).

I think there's an extremely subtle difference in length, plus in American english you might pronounce "writing" with either /d/ or /t/ (probably /d/ in casual speech).

I think if you said "I am riding a book" almost every native english speaker would hear "I am writing a book."

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