"long" and "short" vowels

[Herb Stahlke]

Tom,

At the page you provide a link to below, Wells clearly reference
Received Pronunciation (RP) a couple of times as the dialect he is
dealing with.  The IPA representations he gives for English vowels are
clearly RP.  He's talking about RP.

The reasons why the IPA didn't make it more quickly into dictionaries
are at least two-fold.  First, dedicated, professionally prepared
dictionaries for second language learners are a fairly new phenomenon,
the Oxford Advanced Learners being one of the earliest, and that, as
Wells indicates, is only 61 years old.  Second, the IPA was not
developed or intended for use by the general population or as a
primary teaching tool for second language learners.  It was designed
for and continues to be developed for the description of the sounds of
the world's languages.  For that purpose it works quite well.  As you
have pointed out repeatedly, it's a bit cumbersome for normal written
communication, like email, but it was never intended for that purpose.

Herb

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 11:26 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
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> John Wells says
>  "The earliest general dictionaries to adopt IPA seem to have been dictionaries aimed at learners of English as a foreign language: the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (first edition 1948), the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (first edition, 1978). This was in response to market forces, since specialist teachers of pronunciation for EFL had been using IPA for many years. The first native-speaker dictionary with IPA may have been Collins English Dictionary (first edition 1979)."
> http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-english.htm
>
> This seems incredible since the IPA was created 90 years earlier.  Why did it take so long?  He describes the long/short vowels in the same strange way as below.  He doesn't say it's merely for received pronunciation.
>
> My point still is "Do US English teachers and reading teachers describe long/short vowels as Wells does, or as I learned them a half century ago?
>
>
> Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
> see truespel.com
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------
>> Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:50:11 -0400
>> From: hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM
>> Subject: Re: "long" and "short" vowels
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>> Poster: Herb Stahlke
>> 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 wrote:
>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>>> Poster: Tom Zurinskas
>>> 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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