"long" and "short" vowels

[Kari Castor]

Tom,
The second link your provided (
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-english.htm) comes from a .uk web
address and notes that the author is affiliated with University College
London.

I'd say it's a fair assumption then that the material in question refers to
British English rather than American English.  It's awfully Amero-centric to
assume otherwise.


To answer your question about long and short vowels:

When I was in gradeschool (beginning in the late 80s) I was taught that long
vowels were the sounds in these words:  pay, fee, high, snow, rule.

Short vowels were:  cat, met, tall, hit, etc...

I'm a pre-service teacher (not a linguist, just an interested student of
language), although I'll be teaching at the high school level, so I doubt
this issue is likely to come up much.  However, if it did, I would likely
use the same classifications I was taught in grade school.

As has been pointed out, there is no "official" US English, and no one is
issuing orders about how to use this terminology correctly.  Since most
grade teachers are probably not linguists, and they were probably taught
about long and short vowels the same way you and I appear to have been, I
suspect most teachers continue to use that terminology in the same way.

Kari



On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 7:50 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "long" and "short" vowels
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Tom,
>
> Unlike France, Spain, the Arabic-speaking world, and other nations,
> English has never had a central authority, like France's L'Académie
> française, that takes upon itself the authority to determine what's
> "official" in the language.  Standard American English is a loosely
> defined construct that represents a loose consensus of a variety of
> user populations, and there is disagreement among groups of users as
> to what Standard and what is not.
>
> The terms "long" and "short," as used in phonics instruction, roughly
> reflect a distinction that was true of English vowels before the onset
> of the Great Vowel Shift in the 15th c., or the 13th or 14th depending
> on which sources you read.  Here's a link to a brief description of
> the Great Vowel Shift:
> http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/vowels.html.  There's also
> a decent Wikipedia article on it.  One of the consequences of the GVS
> was that long vowels became diphthongs, as they are in many varieties
> of Modern English.
>
> The page you provided a link to gives the IPA representation of the
> vowels and consonants of what is called British Received
> Pronunciation, not American English.
>
> Herb
>
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Tom Zurinskas<truespel at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: "long" and "short" vowels
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > The reason I bring it up is that the "long vowels" as I was taught were
> the "letter name" vowels for a,e,i,o,u, as in bay, bee, by, beau, boo.  The
> short vowels are also for a,e,i,o,u, as in hat, get, hit, hot, hut.  I think
> USA teachers still teach this way.  Is the change as indicated by the site
> below official for USA English?
> >
> >
> > Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
> > see truespel.com
> >
> >
> >> Formulate what you think the terms "long" and "short" vowels are and see
> the site below to see if you are correct.
> >>
> >> http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm
> >>
> >> Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
> >> see truespel.com
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