In
linguistics, vowel length is the perceived
duration of a
vowel sound. Often the
chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of
English, vowel length is an important
phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in
Arabic,
Czech,
Hindi,
Sanskrit,
Fijian,
Finnish,
Japanese,
Hawaiian,
Hungarian,
Classical Latin,
Lombard,
German,
Latvian,
Old English,
Samoan,
Thai, and
Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of English dialects, and is said to be phonemic in a few dialects, such as
Australian English and
New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in
Cantonese, which is exceptional among the
spoken variants of
Chinese.
See more at Wikipedia.org...
Free Download Now!
