"long" and "short" vowels

[Randy Alexander]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Tom Zurinskas<truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I hope teachers still use that phraseology to link with the past.

You're hoping that they link with the very very distant past -- at
least 500 years ago.  Very few people, let alone students, will have
any familiarity with the form of English that was in use at that time.

"Long" and "short" are very useful terms when dealing with languages
that have such phonemic distinctions, but since the number of speakers
using English dialects that maintain any long/short vowel distinction
is so small (one might even say statistically insignificant), those
terms are very misleading when applied to "standard" English.

In my own teaching and pedagogy (including training English teachers),
I have avoided those terms, replacing them with "basic" for {bat, bet,
bit, bot, but}, and "name" for {bait, beat, bite, boat, beautiful}.
For sounds that are not clearly the five basic or five name sounds of
{a, e, i, o, u}, I call them "other" vowel sounds.

If I mention "long" and "short", I say that those terms formerly
referred to what I call "basic" and "name", but as of 500 years ago
are not applicable (500 years ago there really were long and short
vowels).  However, many teachers unfortunately still use them,
including my teachers when I was little.

For older students who can understand phonetic differences, phonetics
terms can be used instead (front/back, open/close,
diphthong/monophthong/glide, etc).

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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