Vowel length facts for kids
Vowel length is about how long you say a vowel sound in a word. In some languages, saying a vowel for a longer or shorter time can completely change what a word means. This feature is found in many languages, like Japanese, Arabic, Hawaiian, Classical Latin, and Thai. However, many other languages do not use vowel length to tell words apart.
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How Vowel Length Changes Meaning
Let's look at an example from Japanese. The word chizu has a short "i" vowel sound. It means "map". But the word chīzu has a long "i" vowel sound. It means "cheese". The only difference you hear is how long the "i" sound is held. This small change makes them two totally different words.
When linguists use the IPA to write down sounds, a colon (:) shows a long vowel. For example, chizu is written as /t͡ɕizɯ/. But chīzu is written as /t͡ɕi:zɯ/. The colon after the "i" shows it's a long sound.
Vowel Length in English History
Old English, which was spoken long ago, used to have vowel lengthening. This means that how long a vowel was said could change a word's meaning. For example, the words God and good once had similar vowel sounds. But the vowel in good was said longer than in God.
Today, most dialects of Modern English do not use vowel length to tell words apart. Even though our vowel sounds have changed a lot since Old English, we can sometimes guess how old vowels sounded. This is because English spelling often shows a word's history.
In Old English, long vowels could be written with a line above them, like in gōd (good). Later, during the time of Middle English, long vowels were spelled in different ways. Sometimes, two vowels were put together, like in book or break. Other times, a silent "E" was added at the end of a word, like in hate. These vowels were all long until the Great Vowel Shift. This was a big change in English where vowel sounds changed to sound very different from before.
Vowel Length in Classical Latin
Classical Latin also had both long vowels and long consonants. Long vowels were written with a macron, which is a straight line above them. In Classical Latin, ānus (/ˈaː.nus/), annus (/ˈan.nus/), and anus (/ˈa.nus/) were all different words.
- Ānus meant "buttocks".
- Annus meant "year".
- Anus meant "old woman".
Today, the Romance languages are the languages that came from Latin. None of them use vowel length to tell words apart anymore. However, Italian can still tell words apart by consonant length. For example, /anno/ means "year", and /ano/ means "anus". Italian also has long vowels in some syllables, but this length does not change the meaning of words like it did in Latin.
See also
In Spanish: Vocal larga para niños
