When I first came to London I had a Polish landlord . After a week or so I met him on the stairs and he said, "I give the shits".I thought this was a bit coarse of him but he added "and the pillow case”.
As a teacher of ESL in Poland, I assure you that "giving a shit" is rare for a Polish person both, pronunciation-wise (I vow to make sure of that) and mindset-wise. Cherish that landlord cause he gave enough shits to give you some sheets.
Well, that's very typical for us. We do not distinguish vowel lenghts. Some learn this with time, some don't. Personally I struggle with it a lot. I hear the difference but I have troubles reproducing this. I need to focus on this a lot and it sounds unnatural for me :(
Yep there is a difference. The Americans and Canadians pronounce alot of things similar and then the British and Australian accents pronounce things more similar.
Non native English speaker here: when you said SHIP in your own accent I heard SHAPE in what sounded like a Scottish accent; but I was sure it wasn’t SHEEP.
Also born in the USA, but for some reason, at least in my head, I do hear a difference between do, dew and merry, Mary (and rot, wrought). I think, for me it's: do/dew: doo/dyoo merry/Mary: mehree/meeehree (vowel length, as described in this video) rot/wrought: raht/wrauht (hard to explain the 'auh'... it's like a vowel somewhere between ah and uh, for which we have no letter, and that w is barely pronounced, like the lips just barely come together there to make this whisper of a 'w' sound combined with the r... very complicated to explain for me) I dunno if it helps, but I was raised and lived much of my life in the southern United States (particularly North Carolina), but my father worked as a voice talent for most of his life, and kept a fairly neutral American accent. My own accent seems somewhat of a neutral American accent with occasional southernisms leaking in.
@@dmendez4741 Could very well be. At this point, I've lived in Maryland most of my life, but as an adult, so while it surely has impacted my accent, I don't think the other influences have left, either.
I heard an Italian guy trying to say “bullshit”, but saying “boule sheet”, so his friend, who taught English, had to explain “No, Alberto, ‘sheet’ vuol dire ‘lenzuole’ in inglese”. This is another fascinating presentation, which I’m going to forward to my aunt, who teaches singing and voice training.
Your university story reminded me of my time in France years ago. I found great amusement in telling people that my name was Thurther, and listening to them try to pronounce it.
It's also important to note that in many dialects, including General American which is the most widespread dialect of English, /i/ isn't even longer than /ɪ/, and vowel length is governed by completely different factors. In Gen Am specifically, a vowel is long if it's between voiced sounds. So, 'bid' and 'bead' are pronounced [bɪːd] and [biːd] respectively, while 'bit' and 'beat' are pronounced [bɪt] and [bit] respectively. It gets interesting however when we consider the fact that /t/ and /d/ merge to a tap [ɾ] between vowels, but vowel length is still determined by whether we have a phonemic /t/ or a /d/. This creates a handful of true vowel length minimal pairs in GenAm. For instance, 'heating' and 'heeding' are pronounced [ˈçiɾɪŋ] and [ˈçiːɾɪŋ] respectively.
I once heard a Japanese speaker point out that English speakers in general have trouble pronouncing two of the same vowels across syllables, kind of like how nama became name there. Just look at words like "saga", that are pronounced "saw-guh"
@@emmettjay1302 Exactly! It's so interesting how our (English-speakers') brains goes, "Obviously I'm not going to pronounce all these thematic vowels with their full quality. I got places to be." Even happens in languages without strong (lexical) stress. We just pick a syllable and reduce it.
@@emmettjay1302 for bonus points, where most languages have stressed syllables (usually in specific and consistent places) and unstressed syllables, English has 3 or 4 (depending who you ask) different Degrees of stress, in a pattern that is consistent... Except that a word can start at any point in the cycle. Certain vowels can only appear or can't appear in syllables with certain degrees of stress. The consequence of this is that you can't (generally, there are bound to be exceptions) actually Have the same vowel twice in a row unless it's one of the smaller subset of vowels that can actually occur in two different degrees of stress... Except, given that there are pairs of words in English distinguished Only by stress pattern, even those are arguably not the same vowels! Basically, English speakers struggle with having the same vowel twice in a row because, in most contexts, in most dialects, it's not actually possible in English and registers as an error.
@@laurencefraser Interesting. Fun thing is that we have pretty much the same thing with vowels in Russian. Vowels reduce in unstressed syllables into various other vowels , the exact quality of which depends on where they occur in a word. For example, Russian /o/ vowel is realised in several ways: 1) when it is in a *stressed* syllable, it is [o̞] (mid back rounded vowel, akin to one Simon has in "wrought"); 2) in a first pretonic ( i.e. directly before the stress) syllable and at the start of the word (if the word starts on a vowel), it is an [ɐ] vowel (close to the vowel in Enɡlish word "cut"); 3) in second pretonic (i.e. second from the stressed) syllable and posttonic (i.e. after the stressed) syllables it is a schwa [ə]. Examples: молоко (Russian for "milk") is pronounced [məlɐ'ko̞] or even [malaˈko̞] (occurs in Belarus, where I live).
This is a modern pedagogical thing: when I was at primary school in the 1950s, there was no such concept. My first introduction to the idea of long and short vowels was when I started Latin in grammar school. And for the past 40 years I have spoken (on a daily basis) a language that takes the phonemic distinction between long and short vowels very seriously, namely, Japanese.
@@DieFlabbergast Also in Finnish the vowel length is important and lead to entirely different words. Same thing with consonants also, I'm not sure is consonant length important in Japanese also.
I heard SHAPE, as well, but not only due to the exaggerated length in which you held the vowel for the purpose of illustration. I believe that in your particular dialect you happen to pronounce the second highest front phoneme not as high or forward as other speakers. I'm from the U.S. None of what I am saying should be interpreted as a correction or criticism(!!!), but it might explain why so many on this thread heard SHAPE. BTW, you did speak a pure vowel and not the diphthong usually associated with SHAPE, so it had/has a northern British quality rather than a standard quality, such as RP. I love your videos and look forward to every one!! You have an exceptionally interesting way of conveying this stuff!
"I remember in my first year at Uni spending countless joyous hours watching my Spanish friends try and pronounce the difference between _ship_ and _sheep_ " **crying chilean noises**
That the best explanation of rot/wrought I've seen. I've never even understood how someone claims they are pronounced differently before. People who tell me there's a difference always sound like they're saying it the same way to me. But now that you point out the length of the vowel, I can hear it. Being an American, I still don't consider them different but now I understand why others think it is different.
They sound completely different to me. No matter how long I pronounce rot I can't make it sound like the way I'd say wrought. However the way I say wrought does sound a bit like a northern rot.
Think of it this way - a British speaker says wrought about like you do, then for rot says the 'o' a bit more like a hiccup than you would expect. They're actually different sounds in addition to the length factor.
American English speaker here (urban midwestern accent with traces of New York, i.e. not always rhotic and sometimes a distinct NY coffee vowel). I do not distinguish between vowel length at all. I didn't even know this was a thing. For me, Mary and merry are always differences of inflection, and I distinguish caught and cot with a different vowel. (The former with a NY coffee vowel, the latter as cAHt). I also speak Castellano, and it did not seem weird to me that vowel length did not matter. I mainly post this to ask about the importance of inflection in other people's idiolects, as it wasn't covered explicitly in the video.
ill admit it when i first saw your channel on my yt recommenced i was like what?? why would i care but now i actually find it really interesting so im glad i clicked
Some people (in "educated" speech) do make a distinction but (possibly due to american influence re the vowel in seal, wheel, etc) the merger is becoming more common. In this particular sense my idiolect is more similar to that of my grandparents than of my parents.
What part of NI? In my Belfast accent, none of those pairs of words are identical. "Wheel" has a very short /i/ while "whale" has a very pronounced diphthong /ɪə/ to the extent that it almost sounds like "wee-yuhl". I'm pretty sure the l sounds are slightly different too (the former is a "light l" and the latter a "dark l").
@GraemeMarkNI Those are all long vowels, the difference is whether one is pronounced /i:/ and the /e:/ as in most English or both are pronounced /i:/. I guess you would say “I saw a big whale rolling around in the ocean”. That’s sounds pretty cute!
@@TheWiseSalmon Maybe it's pronounced this way in a lax Belfast speech, or maybe it's a rural Northern Ireland dialect. NI alone has so many dialects, it is rather silly how many different ways there are to pronouce words just driving 40km or so around the country.
Lemme tell you, as a worker in Anglish, when reviving words, OE vowel length truly does get you from 10 words that had wholly sundered vowel lengths, diphthongs, so on, to 10 words that all sound the same. And half of the time, I swear, it all goes to /i:/. I guess our forefathers in Shakespeare's time liked the vowel /i:/ a LOT. Also, I'm a believer that English still holds vowel length between the vowel pairs you brought up *phonemically* in its speakers minds, it's only that *phonetically* , they've drifted.
@Jack Ketch I mostly lurk about r/Anglish on Reddit. It's about the only spot where any kind of meaningful progress is made in Anglish. Or rather, it's kind of like where the laying of the groundwork for what needs to be done in Anglish happens.
Yes, as someone who is also an Anglish hobbyist I think you do get a lot of merger of sound in updated OE to modE words. However, I don't think it makes Anglish pointless, as there are literally thousands of OE words ripe for renewal when you consider the usage of suffixes and prefixes to distinguish meaning. This I also employ when calque-ing new words, science words, for example. For-, Be-, Y-, a-, ed-, eft-, -and, -en, -wist, -red, etc. Let's keep Anglish alive!
In my language, Swedish, we have the ship/sheep situation but for every vowel sound. Each vowel has a long and a short equivalent, but they are also distinguished by exact vowel quality. "Food" Mat [mɑːt] vs. "Matte" Matt [mat], "Ugly" Ful [fʉːl] vs. "Drunk" Full [fɵlː], etc. Altogether it's 17-18 vowel phonemes, no diphthongs.
I listen to every video. You are brilliant. Listening from St Louis, Missouri, USA. I've been studying the history of the English language since age 14. Thank you for these videos and please continue them.
Whoa, I wasn't expecting I'd learn an obscure pronunciation rule that is particularly relevant to me as an ESL speaker. Since my native tongue makes phonemic distinction between long and short vowels, I've repeatedly tripped over myself when a supposedly long vowel such as /iː/ gets cut short when followed by an unvoiced consonant and vice versa. I've sorta figured this out on my own albeit subconsciously when speaking off the cuff, but I was constantly overcorrecting myself. So I was right all along, which gives me a kick of ego boost.
Good thing understanding language has a lot to do with context or we'd all have a hard time telling the subtle differences between words or sounds whether native or non-native. I'm a non-native speaker and I also heard shape like a lot of others in the comment section even though I knew I was supposed to hear either ship or sheep. On second listen, trying to tell whether it was ship or sheep it sounded like a drawn-out ship to me. I find that a lot of what helps me understand different English accents is getting used to the 'rhythm' in how people speak so that even if the words they say sound vastly different due to accent between the rhythm and context I can still understand what is said. I thought your exercise felt more like that to me oddly enough. As if I was trying to understand an accent rather than a word specifically if any of this even makes sense. I'm self-taught and moved to a lot of regions with very different English accents (Scotland, England, US) so I think it's just the odd way I compensated to be able to understand some of the very thick accents I encountered that even native speakers seem to struggle with, Rab C Nesbitt comes to mind.
Another fun addition to that. Scip, the Norse version of ship, as you say, was borrowed into the Romance languages, becoming all the words like equipe, equipo, equipment etc. These were then borrowed into English, equipment. Skip, was also borrowed into English as sea captain: Skipper.
In Dutch we still have the relationship between open and closed vowels, and specific spelling rules for that. Bet, bait --> e, ee Ship, sheep --> i, ie Bot, boat --> o, oo The rules we use for open vowels is: - if it comes at the end of a syllable, the vowel is open - if the letter is repeated, the vowel is open - in other cases, the vowel is closed So you have: bek (e), beek (ee), beker (ee), --> be-ker lekker (e) --> lek-ker The short version of uu (like in lute), is hard to find an example word for. You can have a word like "stuck", but 90% of English speakers pronounce it as "stahk". The long version of a (like in luck) is very hard for Americans to say. They'll say "Ahmereekahhhn", instead of "Aamereekaan". I have never heard an English word pronounced with an aa. Writing oe, like in "food" makes also a ton of sense. "OE" is in between "oh" and "eh", if you alternate between the two very rapidly you'll hear yourself saying oooh. Same with how we write "ie" like in "feet". Alternate between "ih" and "eh", and you'll hear yourself say eeee. Of course we have a lot of loan words that we write in the original spelling, so exceptions abound. There is the issue that if we would loan the english word "have", we would write it as "hef", which will be a short "eh", not the "e:h". We don't have the custom to put a "v" at the end of a word, so we can't do that. No way to write a drawn out closed vowel. Thus, a lot of foreign spelling in Dutch.
Hehe, a French pianist talking English with an "outrageous accent" was explaining his next piece to a German audience. A very long and very emotional explanation. And the title was "Ze Bitch"...
As a non-native speaker, I dodge that word in favour of shore, seaside, strand, bay. Human languages are so rich and have vast reservoirs of redundancy to exploit. :-)
My friend, a native Korean speaker, always says _beach_ as _beeeech,_ making the vowel sound _really_ long, so that he doesn’t mispronounce it with a short _i._
I teach EFL to Spanish speakers and often, they have difficulty pronouncing certain voiced final consonants. The presence of vowel lengthening is very strong in my accent (Inland North, I'd definitely agree that any phonemic vowel length pales in comparison to rule-governed lengthening), so they've often been able to distinguish minimal pairs by lengthening the preceding vowel. So the distinction between loose and lose becomes /lus/ and /lu:s(:)/ instead of /lus/ and /luz/. They do often voice the final sound but inconsistently and the vowel differentiation helps achieve sound discrimination. quick edit: that recovery strategy actually reminds me of Friulian, which gained phonemic vowel length after those final consonants devoiced, leaving the vowel length alone.
I don't think you can post links here, but there's a question on the English language Stack Exchange called "are 'horse' and 'whores' homophones?" and there is a long explanation of the fact that the "S" in "whores" SOUNDS voiced to us because of vowel length but actually isn't.
@@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77 It's an interesting question, and I've had a look at some (but not all) of the commentary. I think the one thing that is being missed that in /hɔːs/ the voicing is terminated before onset of the /s/, but in /hɔːz/ it carries on through the onset of the /z/, although it does tend to trail off.
That explains a lot of the spelling hijinks in modern English, at least as far as the vowels go. It's also kind of interesting how you pronounce "I'm" like /ʌ͡ɪm/. In my dialect, we say /aːm/ for "I'm". I wonder how you pronounce the 1PS pronoun "I" because there it drops to /ʌ͡ɪ/ for me. The strut vowel is very interesting and might make a great video on its own.
I‘m an Australian primary school teacher who sometimes teaches primary school German. It‘s always been hard trying to teach children the pronunciation of the German colour: rot (red). In German it‘s pronounced more like the English word wrought than rot. Thanks for the tip Simon. 😊
what do you think of analyzing australian english (which might be able to be extended to england english?) as having phonemic vowel length (but not with traditional pairs): bid /bid/ beard /biːd/ ed /ed/ aired /eːd/ lad /læd/ bad /bæːd/ rod /ɹɔd/ roared /ɹɔːd/ (this one the quality does differ a bit) took /tʊk/ tour /tʊː/ hut /hɐt/ heart /hɐːt/
im an american english speaker who talks frequently to my australian english speaking dad and yeah, a lot of words are distinguished by vowel length, especially cause of the dropped r
Probably replace lad and bad with can (verb) and can (noun), which are proper minimal pairs. Also /bɪd/ and /bɪːd/ please, /i/ is a distinct phoneme and it just really hurts my poor fragile soul seeing this misrepresented. But yeah Australian Vowel Length is pretty cool.
As an Australian, I have pretty much the same distinctions, though my vowels are somewhat different in quality, participating in a chain shift, caused by the lowering of the trap vowel. i → ɪ, e →ɛ, æ → a, ɐ→ ɑ Also, ʊ may be fronted to a central vowel, but this is somewhat variable. This results in: bid /bɪd/ beard /bɪːd/ ed /ɛd/ aired /ɛːd/ lad /lad/ bad /baːd/ rod /ɹɔd/ roared /ɹɔːd/ (both mid, though rod is slightly lower and more centralised than roared, but if I drawl it out, it can easily be mistaken for roared. This is almost there with a merger in quality) took /tʊk/ tour /tʊː/ hut /hɑt/ heart /hɑːt/ I am a young speaker in an upper-middle-class background and live in Canberra, for context. I generally sound on the posher side of Australian English.
I’ll never forget the Italian that spoke good English and migrated to Australia. When he found he couldn’t understand what was being said, he said he was not prepared for the “wang wang” language.
Great video! Such an interesting topic! Totally agree with you that the defining difference between /i:/ and /ɪ/ is quality and not length. Just a detail, the transcription of "feeling" should be /ˈfiːlɪŋ/, with the velar nasal rather than the /ng/
I was in a bar in the Kansai region and some Japanese people started chatting me and my friend up in Japanese, asking how long we'd been there, were we students, had we visited anywhere in Japan. My friend said oh yeah, we traveled around the Kansai area: Nara, Kyoto, Osaka... "Where?" "Osaka." "Huh? I've never heard of that, where's that?" "What?? It's...a really famous big city!" "Really?" So I chimed in "Ōsaka". "Ooooh, Ōsaka! Why didn't you say so!" In their defense they were a bit drunk, but still, this is the story I use to explain why distinguishing vowel length in Japanese is important.
Italian has vowel length but is allophonic, vowels are pronounced long in open syllables (I pronounce them long before r followed by a consonant different from r and word finally. This is common but I believe that not all speakers do it) Fato /ˈfa.to/ [ˈfaːto] (fate) Fatto /fat.to/ [ˈfat̚.to] (done) Arto /ar.to/ [aːr.to] (arm) Alto /al.to/ [alto] (tall) Like in Scots this is phonemic but pronouncing the vowel always short will give you an accent
That's my problem with Italian, I've studied it a bit by myself (can't understand/read pretty much 100%) but have never really practiced speaking and I would have no idea how to pronounce the long vowels in a natural way without making them sound short. Thank god French doesn't have them anymore
'Bin'' and 'been' ( both as 'bin' ) in Norfolk accents are often the same. As with ' bear' and 'beer' ( both as 'bear' ) or 'hair' and 'here' ( both as 'hair ) and numerous other examples: also the 'stone' example would be 'stun' and 'stone' the same, both as 'stun' - though also many Norfolk accents though sounding the same, have different vowel sounds depending on area of the county, so many in Norfolk have longer vowel on O, eg stone can be more like 'stooone', same with 'moooment' This can be observed in the famous Norfolk word 'bor' used like 'mate' in Norfolk and derived from the Germanic 'boer' etc, meaning farmer, peasant farmer. In the West of the county it gets stunted to 'buh' and totally non-shotic - Whilst more east it is 'boorr' . - Would love to see a video on the Norfolk ( and Suffolk, accents ) which a trove of archaic-ness, perhaps more to the Middle English period I guess. Though there are some older characteristics there also. I think if you read some Shakespeare in a Norfolk accent, it will still rhyme :-)
Towel and tile are also pronounced the same around the east Norfolk area, and end up sounding like 'taahl'. 'Hour' ends up sounding like 'are' and 'tower' ends up as 'tar'. It's an interesting accent for those from abroad I can imagine.
@@noahlaws531 Another Naarfaak ol bor I see ;-) Do yew bin a troshin ol buh - another couple of nice things lost since the old boys in the 1980s is the use of 'hine' for 'him' which is cognate with 'ihn' (German) and 'hann' (Icelandic) and the pronuciation of V as a W as in 'Willage' for 'Village'. :-)
American here (from Maryland, but it probably doesn't matter). I do think certain vowels are pronounced longer than others, and it's significant enough that you can notice it and use it to help figure out what word it was- but at the end of the day, if someone disregarded those patterns I wouldn't think they said anything wrong (and would most likely not even notice). The most significant example you had that definitely happens in my dialect is the distinction between vowels before voiced/voiceless consonants. Oh, and I noticed that I pronounce my sister's name, Natalie, with a very short initial a, almost a tap. In fact, I pronounce all three vowels (/æ/, /ə/, and /i/ for me) really short. But other people _really_ draw that first a out, and I don't think that's wrong at all! It sounds completely normal to me- I just don't do that. I probably rush though it cause I'm used to saying her name super fast?? maybe
It‘s all about parsing. Parsing ist the transformation of a serial structure into a tree structure of a relational tree. Interestingly the parser structures are shifting over time. „Merry Mary married.“ is for a German native speaker easy to decompose. Following Wolfgang Köhler‘s bouba-kiki effect, that language, that there is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of Objects, we have one entry point for analyzing vowels in a more brain prone manner. „Tar“ and German „kleben“ inherit the sluggish and slowly feature of being glued. Because this is not always the case, we evade in thinking, that language is a random selection. For me is the most interesting development in modern English the disintegration of literal spelling and vocal pronunciation. It still goes on: Even „tear“ and „tear“ can be vocalized differently, depending on context. In „tearing apart“ we revisit the tenacity of „tar“.
such an interesting video!! i didn't even know that there was sometimes a spoken difference in other english dialects of words like "merry" and "Mary"!! also i always like your attempts at an american accent because it sounds very very southern lol
véreb (bloodhound) veréb (sparrow) dráhy (roads, often railroads) drahý (dear, expensive) Both Hungarian and Czech have distinctive vowel length and nondistinctive stress, which is normally on the first syllable of a word.
With the “rot” and “wrought” example, I pronounce the vowels the same, but the Rs are different. Starting from these different Rs, the vowels tend to have a slightly different tonality because my mouth started in a different shape.
At the same time, Hungarians are also conveniently taught that we have a “short e” as in “Eger” [‘ɛgɛr], a historical town in Hungary, and a “long e” as the first vowel in “éger” [‘e:gɛr], “alder”, or the second one in “egér” [‘ɛge:r]. In fact, the “short e” is [ɛ], while the “long e” is [e:], which is always twice as long as [ɛ], but they are also different in quality. This simplification is also used for “a” and “á”: “alma” [‘ɒlmɒ] “apple” vs. “álma” [‘a:lmɒ] “his/her/its dream” vs “almát” [‘ɒlma:t] “apple-accusative” vs “álmát” [‘a:lma:t] “his/her/its dream-accusative]. - And then try to separate stress (always on the first syllable) from “vowel length” because in Hungarian stress does not “make” the vowel “long”: you can have [‘a:] as well as [a:], [‘ɒ] as well as [ɒ]. See the examples above.
I’m a native English (and Spanish, dual learning) speaker, and I can hear and mimic the spoken vowel differences in all the words, but I don’t pronounce them like that in my own speech. “Merry” and “Mary” are almost indistinguishable. During the experiment, I was sure the word was “SHAPE”, but I can hear the other variances.
I find the way you looked at the Scottish vowel environment thing very interesting. As a linguistics student (and a speaker of a Midwest accent that isn’t Great Lakes), I leaned that in *Standard American English, a vowel followed by a voiceless consonant is short, but followed by a voiced consonant is long. In my accent, as well as most of America, say /biːn/, but /bit/ for Bean and beet. In the same way, sheep and ship have the same length for me, being short because of the voiceless environment. Ship and sheep differ by quality, sheep and she’d differ by length. /ʃɪp/, /ʃip/, and /ʃiːd/. That’s why it’s so interesting to me that the most obvious difference for you is length not quality. And for me, marry, merry, and Mary are exactly the same. I guess in length because of the same environment, as compared to you. All /æ/ on account of the accent. And yeah, great video as always.
Vowels are usually longer before voiced consonants in English, true. I think the difference is more tangible in American English though where there is more truly a difference between lax and tense vowels than short and long vowels, whereas in an English dialect like Australian English that does distinguish vowel length, the phonemically long vowels are still more obviously long than short vowels before voiced consonants. Hence Australian English could be said to have four different phonetic vowel lengths (but only two distinct lengths): eg. but < bud < Bart < bard
As a British English speaker with a southern accent, I heard "sheep" for /ʃɪːp/ (ignoring the possibility of "shape"), while finding "ship" quite hard to hear. Anecdotally, I think that vowel pair is particularly governed by length - I'm not sure I've ever heard /ɪː/ before and I've never recognised it as an "i" sound.
The development of the vowels is interesting. We often talk about the great vowel shift in linguistic circles, but when do you think most of our long vowels became diphthongs? I'm a native English speaker from Canada and the vowels in shape, rude, boat, mate, name etc. are all diphthongs in my accent, but they all sound like one long phoneme in every reenactment of Old or Middle or even Early Modern English that I've heard. Yet they're all diphthongs in the vast majority of native English dialects today.
Good video. In the UK we distinguish between Mary, marry and merry. All three words are pronounced in three different ways. Apparently there are some American accents where they are all pronounced exactly the same.
this is where the use of the circumflex in Welsh is so handy! The circumflex, commonly called 'to bach' ('small roof' in Welsh) is used to lenghen the vowel (and, remember w and y are vowels in Welsh; w = u; y = schwa and sometimes a soft i; u = is similar to French u in northern Wales, but same as i in the south). The circumflex is used to show vowel length but only if there is also another word with the same spelling and could cause misunderstanding (though Welsh spelling of English words use the circumflex liberally e.g. jîns (jeans); bîns (beans). So mor (as) is without circumflex, but môr (sea) is with. The issue with ship and sheep would be sorted by spelling it 'ship' and 'shîp'. Merry/Mary would be 'meri' and Mêri'.
It's still incredibly hard to talk about English vowels because of dialects and the great vowel shift. In my dialect of northern Californian English, all the "merries" are the same, but I don't have the caught/cot distinction, but my vowels for them aren't the typical English ones. It's more like cot with /a/ and caught with /ɑ/. I agree with you that vowel length is not phonemic (/fo'ni:mɪk̚/) and you brought up the best bit of evidence: that, if there are voiced consonants, especially after a short/lax vowel, then it can be longer than a "long" long vowel in the same circumstances. I think, in modern English, the crucial distinction is between tense and lax vowels: tense vowels are long, of a certain quality, and tend to be stressed, while lax vowels are short, of a different quality, and tend to be unstressed. English heavily relies on stress accent, which is not how many languages operate.
7:40 that's something really important that most teachers of EFL not give proper focus. Most students think that if you get the length right you can do poorly with vowel quality when it's usually the other way around.
Your ship/sheep example also revealed a difference to my ear in the pronunciation of the 'sh' sound. I hear a deeper, fuller sound in SHip and a somewhat higher, thinner sound in SHeep. As a student of the Polish language, I believe these two sounds approximate to the SZ and Ś sounds in Polish. I'm not a native speaker, so would be interested to hear from any that are.
1:37 I understand the point you’re making, but I feel like you are underselling the importance and usefulness of context. While this may not always work, I feel like anyone listening to you say that sentence would know exactly what you meant.
English is my second language, but probably because I was already primed and sort of anticipating where you were going I heard ship and sheep respectively.
Nonnative speaker here. I've been wondering why your demonstration of SHIP sounded like SHAPE to me and to a fair bit of other people, and maybe there could be one more variable other than the length of the vowel: lack of a guttural stop in your demonstration. I believe in many English accents and dialects single syllable words with the vowel /ɪ/ have a guttural stop before the final consonant, which in this case was /p/, where words like shape don't. Could this be it?
I live in Czech Republic where they have e and é and a - á . I'm always being picked up for shortening these vowels, it's just a bit hard for a Scotsman to make longer vowels You said favourite perfectly with a Scottish accent , not sure sure about rake. When you were using your own accent I heard shape!
I imagine that the word one in English also used to have an overlong vowel, if it managed to turn the initial part of its diphtongisation into a semiconsonant
@@zoria2718 "aa". "aaa" would be cool though. Overlong is a rather recent development of compensating syllable loss at the end of words with elongated first syllables. Examples (nominative - illative) (Finnish) Mäki- mäkeen (Estonian) Mägi - mäkke (high stress on k)
6:54 Nice "hw-", by the way, what dialects have the initial h- in the words written with silent -h- after the initial w-? Is it only a Scottish thing (I read only about it, but heard it from some Americans as well) or it's pronounced this way also in the North British, Irish etc ones?
I wrote the H with two dashes from both sides and youtube decided that I wanted to strike it through. Interesting (c), so one can add styles to the text in comments here, or not? Test (right: w/o whitespaces): - h - : -h- - word - : -word- * h * : *h* _ h _ : _h_ UPD: it works.
Another fun fact is that if this sound change (glide cluster reduction) progresses further, it will result in a loss of /h/ before /j/, resulting in "yuge," "yuman," etc
In AMERICAN English we have vowels becoming shorter before voiceless consonants but also closed syllables as well. For example: there is a significant phonetic distinction with the vowel /eɪ/. “Bay” [bɛi̯t] is pronounced different from “bait” [bet], so vowel length definitely does affect quality there.
In Spanish we have something that may be similar to a long vowel. This happens when we have a root of a word ending in "-e" and it joins into the "-er" ending of the infinitive form. For example "creer" or "leer" aren't pronounce as if there was only one /e̞/, rather there is a little change in tone (rising) or a slight change in the vowel quality, like /e̞e/. However, if you make no distinction between both vowels it's still normal, so you could have /e̞ː/ in that case.
Verily I am feeling Mary today. And yes, American randomly change vowels even in proper nouns like European place names and given names. Proper nouns require the correct accent and language to be adopted.
When you said /ʃı:p/, as a German speaker, I heard sheep, because /ı:/ sounds a quite like /e:/. I expected some kind of Scottish accent I guess. Also, Scottish pronunciation is closer to German.
First part: Yes, also more heard sheep than ship. Second part: With the variety of accents and dialects in Germany, I am not sure one can generalize saying that Scottish is closer to German. And maybe it is due to where I live(d) in Germany and that I am not overly familiar with Scottish, but I cannot think of a German dialect being very close to Scottish. First difference that comes to my mind is the sound for "r", as an example.
@Jack Ketch Correct, Scottish is more conservative in pronunciation than modern English, closer to middle English. Modern English (let alone American dialects) vowel qualities are fairly odd compared to other Germanic dialects. Every conservative English dialect sound more familiar to us than modern English.
@Jack Ketch OK, maybe so. For me, Scottish does not seem to be more easy to pronounce than RP English. However, that is for one surely depending on what German dialect(s) I can speak and secondly on what few I know about Scottish pronounciation. Maybe it is a different story the other way around.
One thing that people never seem to talk about with English vowel length is that different vowels behave quite differently (or is it just my accent? I'm from Merseyside, though outside of Liverpool and without a strong Scouse accent---but I've never noticed much in the way of differences in vowel length behaviour when listening to people from different regions of England) Sure, my high vowels behave much as you describe: they're long before voiced consonants, short before voiceless consonant (and word-finally). Maybe they're a little longer than other short vowels when short, but it's not an easily noticeable difference for me, whereas this difference here is. In terms of perception, an ultra-short [ʃip] certainly sounds like "sheep", although [ʃɪːp] doesn't really sound like anything else, it just sounds weird. A similar alternation occurs with the diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/ which have a long pronunciation with laxed off-glide ([aːɪ], [aːʊ]) before voiced consonants (and word-finally! unlike the high vowels) and a short tense pronunciation ([aj], [aw]) before voiceless consonants (with one exception: short tense [aw] also occurs before "dark" /l/). But none of the other monophthongs or diphthongs alternate in this way (not to an extent that I can clearly notice, anyhow). The three vowels /ɜː/, /ɑː/, /ɔː/ (I don't have /ɛː/ because it's merged into /ɜː/ in my accent) seem always about as long as /i/ in "seed", and all the other vowels seem always about as short as /i/ in "seat". Since I lack /ɛː/, none of the always-long vowels have exactly the same quality as any of the always-short vowels. Nevertheless, perception tests reveal that the quantity is a more significant element in the contrasts than quality for me. If I shorten /ɑː/ to [ɑ] in "sharp", I get something that almost sounds like "shop", definitely more like that than "sharp"; conversely if I lengthen /ɒ/ to [ɒː] in "shop", it sounds like "sharp". Likewise /ɔː/ shortened in "bought" sounds like /ʊ/ in my Northern "but", and /ʊ/ lengthened in "but" makes it sound like "bought". (I'm not very good at identifying back vowels, so it's possible that my /ɔː/ and /ʊ/ are closer to [oː] and [o] than my transcriptions would suggest.) Although it's pretty rare, /ɜː/ can occur in unstressed syllables in words like "transfer" where shortening it would definitely make it sound more like schwa than anything else. So it seems clear that for my accent, there are three distinct groups of vowel phonemes with respect to length: six in phonemically contrastive short-long pairs (/ɒ/ ~ /ɑː/, /ʊ/ ~ /ɔː/ and /ə/ ~ /ɜː/) with an accompanying quantity difference of secondary importance, four with only an allophonic length alternation (/i/, /u/, /aj/ and /aw/), and the remaining group with no phonetic or phonemic length contrast.
Hey Simon I've got an interesting video idea you might like. A while ago I was talking to a friend about how in HIMYM they have a different actor voicing Ted from the future,however most adults voices dont change,let alone change after 30. We then got talking about how humans identify voices and what makes them unique. Maybe you could do a vid on that topic. Maybe talk about how (mostly English speakers) identify each other solely on voice?
The same applies to German: Not only the length of the vowel changes but its quality, too. In my language only short and long "a" and "ä" have the same quality. Even the quality of "ü" shifts to a darker tone when becoming short though phonetic transscription ignores that. -- I read this from one Brazilian: "Is it true that "keys" and "kiss" are pronounced the same?"
One case I think is interesting is vowel length affecting the perception of voicing or voicelessness later in the word -- the actual distinction, I'm given to understand, between "horse" and "whores," which are actually both pronounced with a voiceless "S."
Dutch traditionally has a system where the quality differs as well as the quantity, very similar to what you suggest late Middle English may have had. But modern loanwords have introduced vowels that break the automatic length assignment: the English loanword "lease" has a long vowel distinct from "lies", but also distinct in quality from "lis". This seems to indicate that vowel length distinctions were lost and then reintroduced, albeit at a marginal level. Are there any cases of this happening in English?
To me it seems that originally in some older phase of English the difference was likely the vowel length, because in the continental Germanic languages it usually is. Well, I'm not sure of Dutch and Frisian, and those are the closest cousins to English. It's a physiological tendency, taht the long vowels tend to be said more clearly, or more in the extremities of the mouth cavity, because they have more time to reach the extremes. And this is even further typical in languages where the stressed syllable (and vowel) are strongly said, like mainly in English dialects - especially compared to the unstressed ones, which English tends to blur. Yet the great vowel shift much blurred this, because the i vowel in /pine/ used to be something close to 'peen', so it was the long vowel, compared to pin etc. This is still how most of the Germanic languages do them. Plus besides the vowel shift, Celtic languages have affected English pronunciation, because since the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England, they started to mix with the Celts. They were not 'ethnically cleansed', but gradually adapted the new ruling language - the Anglo-Saxons were the upper cast, and the country was run with their language. Then came the Normans, and the celtic langues in the west and North got breathing time, when English became a lower class language herself. Until the Normans had blendid with the Normans (and Celts) by the Colonial time. The 100 years war with France was likely a motivational push for the Normans to become truely English. Yet their accent affected English as well - and French like Spanish, doesn't need to distinguish long and short vowels - the length is more like just one of the signs of stress. So both the Celtic substratum and Norman French superstratum likely affected to English not using the length as a distinguishing feature of the vowels, at least mainly. Noteworthy is also that the tendency is even stronger in the USA, maybe because the Northern English accents became the dominant there, in the Northern States. Plus the multitude of immigrants from many cultures may have supported the tendency. I think most languages don't use length as a phonemic difference, so to separate meanings, like in Simon's dialect merry vs. Mary.
My dialect (North-Central American English) uses vowel length in a way completely different to yours. Firstly, the traditional long vowels have shortened, becoming the same length as their "short" counterparts. Secondly, when a vowel, be it a phoneme or part of a diphthong, is preceded by itself or its semivowel counterpart, the two sounds combine into a single long vowel. This means that at a phonetic level, the only difference between, for example, sure [ʃɚ] and surer [ʃɚː] is vowel length.
Well, it's simply because in Russian only /i/ is a phoneme, and [ɪ] occurs only in unstressed position (unlike English, where both /i/ and /ɪ/ are phonemes), so a native Russian speaker can't distinguish [i] and [ɪ] unless they had the training (say, a course of practical phonetics of English).
I'm an american english speaker, specifically from the midwest. I find in my accent I don't mke distinctions between long and short vowels. The Mary/merry bit near the beginning is interesting, because I can hear it in a birtish english accent, but I don't think I make the distinction myself. I think midwestern americans are often accused of speaking "quickly", and I weonder how much of that reaction comes from losing the distinction between short and long vowels. I've also had a few beers at this point so.... excuse my merry ramblings if they don't make any sense :)
Non-native English-speaker here: To me, the main difference between "ship" and "sheep" is the vowel length. Sure, the vowel quality is slightly different, but to me, the main difference is vowel length. In my native Hungarian, short vowels are supposed to be laxed, but not as much as in English. Also, when you said "ship" in your own accent, it sounded like "shape" to me. Yes, I pronounce the "ay"-vowel as [eː] and [eːj], depending on context.
In Norwegian we have double and single consonants in writing, which is taught as if it controls the stress of the word. That's just wrong. You'd imagine it corresponds to consonant length (which it probably did in old Norse), but today it mostly controls wowel length on the preceding vowel. The rule seems to be that a double consonant makes the preceding vowel short even if it otherwise would be long. Consonant length just tends to be longer if stressed, or after a short vowel no matter how it's written. The problem is that in many dialects consonants can in fact be long independent of surrounding vowels, making the double consonant rules very hard to learn. It would really be much better if we marked long vowels that deviate from the standard rythm, and dropped double consonants altogether.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
When I first came to London I had a Polish landlord . After a week or so I met him on the stairs and he said, "I give the shits".I thought this was a bit coarse of him but he added "and the pillow case”.
As a teacher of ESL in Poland, I assure you that "giving a shit" is rare for a Polish person both, pronunciation-wise (I vow to make sure of that) and mindset-wise.
Cherish that landlord cause he gave enough shits to give you some sheets.
An Italian visiting Malta
Same in Scouse.
Well, that's very typical for us. We do not distinguish vowel lenghts. Some learn this with time, some don't. Personally I struggle with it a lot. I hear the difference but I have troubles reproducing this. I need to focus on this a lot and it sounds unnatural for me :(
Im from Spain and today I learned there's a distinction between ship and sheep
Yep there is a difference. The Americans and Canadians pronounce alot of things similar and then the British and Australian accents pronounce things more similar.
Not always it depends on the accent and person. :-)
Non native English speaker here: when you said SHIP in your own accent I heard SHAPE in what sounded like a Scottish accent; but I was sure it wasn’t SHEEP.
Canadian from Alberta here. The first "sh p" sounded like an Gaelic "shape".
New Englander here. I heard shape too.
In Lancastrian English, specifically a Chorley accent, that is exactly how you pronounce "shape". Like "SHURP"
I hear shep. Whether that is a word I don't onestly know .
Born in Essex, brought up in France - I heard "shape" too (but in a strange accent).
I love how logical spelling becomes when you use middle english pronunciation
Born in the USA, now in Canada. I find it interesting that I hear no difference in some vowels like do, dew or merry, Mary.
We pronounce mary/marry/merry, do/dew, rot/wrought all the same here in Iowa too
Also born in the USA, but for some reason, at least in my head, I do hear a difference between do, dew and merry, Mary (and rot, wrought). I think, for me it's:
do/dew: doo/dyoo
merry/Mary: mehree/meeehree (vowel length, as described in this video)
rot/wrought: raht/wrauht (hard to explain the 'auh'... it's like a vowel somewhere between ah and uh, for which we have no letter, and that w is barely pronounced, like the lips just barely come together there to make this whisper of a 'w' sound combined with the r... very complicated to explain for me)
I dunno if it helps, but I was raised and lived much of my life in the southern United States (particularly North Carolina), but my father worked as a voice talent for most of his life, and kept a fairly neutral American accent. My own accent seems somewhat of a neutral American accent with occasional southernisms leaking in.
@@fleeb your spelling approximations make it seem like your accent is probably more southern sounding than you suspect
beg and bag are also pronounced the same in Ontario, probably in other places too
@@dmendez4741 Could very well be. At this point, I've lived in Maryland most of my life, but as an adult, so while it surely has impacted my accent, I don't think the other influences have left, either.
7:40 "Shape" in Yorkshire accent
7:49 "Ship" in Brummie accent
I heard an Italian guy trying to say “bullshit”, but saying “boule sheet”, so his friend, who taught English, had to explain “No, Alberto, ‘sheet’ vuol dire ‘lenzuole’ in inglese”. This is another fascinating presentation, which I’m going to forward to my aunt, who teaches singing and voice training.
Your university story reminded me of my time in France years ago. I found great amusement in telling people that my name was Thurther, and listening to them try to pronounce it.
"sœrsure"
@@la_lavanda pretty much. I'm a bit of a dick, aren't I?
It's also important to note that in many dialects, including General American which is the most widespread dialect of English, /i/ isn't even longer than /ɪ/, and vowel length is governed by completely different factors. In Gen Am specifically, a vowel is long if it's between voiced sounds. So, 'bid' and 'bead' are pronounced [bɪːd] and [biːd] respectively, while 'bit' and 'beat' are pronounced [bɪt] and [bit] respectively. It gets interesting however when we consider the fact that /t/ and /d/ merge to a tap [ɾ] between vowels, but vowel length is still determined by whether we have a phonemic /t/ or a /d/. This creates a handful of true vowel length minimal pairs in GenAm. For instance, 'heating' and 'heeding' are pronounced [ˈçiɾɪŋ] and [ˈçiːɾɪŋ] respectively.
Is there an American dialect refered to as "general american"?
@@emmettjay1302 There is. It's been heavily influenced by Film and TV.
@@emmettjay1302 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
I once heard a Japanese speaker point out that English speakers in general have trouble pronouncing two of the same vowels across syllables, kind of like how nama became name there. Just look at words like "saga", that are pronounced "saw-guh"
Yeah because non-stressed vowels are often reduced to schwa in English.
@@emmettjay1302 Exactly! It's so interesting how our (English-speakers') brains goes, "Obviously I'm not going to pronounce all these thematic vowels with their full quality. I got places to be." Even happens in languages without strong (lexical) stress. We just pick a syllable and reduce it.
@@emmettjay1302 for bonus points, where most languages have stressed syllables (usually in specific and consistent places) and unstressed syllables, English has 3 or 4 (depending who you ask) different Degrees of stress, in a pattern that is consistent... Except that a word can start at any point in the cycle. Certain vowels can only appear or can't appear in syllables with certain degrees of stress. The consequence of this is that you can't (generally, there are bound to be exceptions) actually Have the same vowel twice in a row unless it's one of the smaller subset of vowels that can actually occur in two different degrees of stress... Except, given that there are pairs of words in English distinguished Only by stress pattern, even those are arguably not the same vowels!
Basically, English speakers struggle with having the same vowel twice in a row because, in most contexts, in most dialects, it's not actually possible in English and registers as an error.
@@laurencefraser Interesting.
Fun thing is that we have pretty much the same thing with vowels in Russian.
Vowels reduce in unstressed syllables into various other vowels , the exact quality of which depends on where they occur in a word. For example, Russian /o/ vowel is realised in several ways:
1) when it is in a *stressed* syllable, it is [o̞] (mid back rounded vowel, akin to one Simon has in "wrought");
2) in a first pretonic ( i.e. directly before the stress) syllable and at the start of the word (if the word starts on a vowel), it is an [ɐ] vowel (close to the vowel in Enɡlish word "cut");
3) in second pretonic (i.e. second from the stressed) syllable and posttonic (i.e. after the stressed) syllables it is a schwa [ə].
Examples: молоко (Russian for "milk") is pronounced [məlɐ'ko̞] or even [malaˈko̞] (occurs in Belarus, where I live).
You can just do all the accents perfectly. That's a skill I'd love to have hahaha.
I remember learning "long" and "short" vowels in kindergarten and being like "tf's this, vowels aren't short or long, they're just vowels!"
This is a modern pedagogical thing: when I was at primary school in the 1950s, there was no such concept. My first introduction to the idea of long and short vowels was when I started Latin in grammar school. And for the past 40 years I have spoken (on a daily basis) a language that takes the phonemic distinction between long and short vowels very seriously, namely, Japanese.
@@DieFlabbergast Also in Finnish the vowel length is important and lead to entirely different words. Same thing with consonants also, I'm not sure is consonant length important in Japanese also.
I heard SHAPE, as well, but not only due to the exaggerated length in which you held the vowel for the purpose of illustration. I believe that in your particular dialect you happen to pronounce the second highest front phoneme not as high or forward as other speakers. I'm from the U.S. None of what I am saying should be interpreted as a correction or criticism(!!!), but it might explain why so many on this thread heard SHAPE. BTW, you did speak a pure vowel and not the diphthong usually associated with SHAPE, so it had/has a northern British quality rather than a standard quality, such as RP. I love your videos and look forward to every one!! You have an exceptionally interesting way of conveying this stuff!
"I remember in my first year at Uni spending countless joyous hours watching my Spanish friends try and pronounce the difference between _ship_ and _sheep_ "
**crying chilean noises**
Made me think of mi abuela de Cuba, ship/sheep, sheet/shit
And that, nietos and nietas, is how I ended up in Singapore.
I have a chilean friend who can't tell the difference between shed and shit.
She'd say "holy shed" all of the time XD
That the best explanation of rot/wrought I've seen. I've never even understood how someone claims they are pronounced differently before. People who tell me there's a difference always sound like they're saying it the same way to me. But now that you point out the length of the vowel, I can hear it. Being an American, I still don't consider them different but now I understand why others think it is different.
They sound completely different to me. No matter how long I pronounce rot I can't make it sound like the way I'd say wrought. However the way I say wrought does sound a bit like a northern rot.
Think of it this way - a British speaker says wrought about like you do, then for rot says the 'o' a bit more like a hiccup than you would expect. They're actually different sounds in addition to the length factor.
American English speaker here (urban midwestern accent with traces of New York, i.e. not always rhotic and sometimes a distinct NY coffee vowel). I do not distinguish between vowel length at all. I didn't even know this was a thing. For me, Mary and merry are always differences of inflection, and I distinguish caught and cot with a different vowel. (The former with a NY coffee vowel, the latter as cAHt). I also speak Castellano, and it did not seem weird to me that vowel length did not matter. I mainly post this to ask about the importance of inflection in other people's idiolects, as it wasn't covered explicitly in the video.
ill admit it when i first saw your channel on my yt recommenced i was like what?? why would i care but now i actually find it really interesting so im glad i clicked
In my accent (Northern Ireland), “wheel” and “whale” are the same, and of course “seal, sail,” “keel, kale,” etc.
Some people (in "educated" speech) do make a distinction but (possibly due to american influence re the vowel in seal, wheel, etc) the merger is becoming more common. In this particular sense my idiolect is more similar to that of my grandparents than of my parents.
What part of NI? In my Belfast accent, none of those pairs of words are identical. "Wheel" has a very short /i/ while "whale" has a very pronounced diphthong /ɪə/ to the extent that it almost sounds like "wee-yuhl". I'm pretty sure the l sounds are slightly different too (the former is a "light l" and the latter a "dark l").
@GraemeMarkNI Those are all long vowels, the difference is whether one is pronounced /i:/ and the /e:/ as in most English or both are pronounced /i:/. I guess you would say “I saw a big whale rolling around in the ocean”. That’s sounds pretty cute!
@@TheWiseSalmon Maybe it's pronounced this way in a lax Belfast speech, or maybe it's a rural Northern Ireland dialect. NI alone has so many dialects, it is rather silly how many different ways there are to pronouce words just driving 40km or so around the country.
And I'll bet you have no trouble telling the one from the other. In language, context is almost everything.
The reason that a lot of people heard "shape" is because the vowel sound /ɪ/ is a lot closer to /e/ (in many dialects) than it is to /i/
Lemme tell you, as a worker in Anglish, when reviving words, OE vowel length truly does get you from 10 words that had wholly sundered vowel lengths, diphthongs, so on, to 10 words that all sound the same. And half of the time, I swear, it all goes to /i:/. I guess our forefathers in Shakespeare's time liked the vowel /i:/ a LOT.
Also, I'm a believer that English still holds vowel length between the vowel pairs you brought up *phonemically* in its speakers minds, it's only that *phonetically* , they've drifted.
@Jack Ketch I mostly lurk about r/Anglish on Reddit. It's about the only spot where any kind of meaningful progress is made in Anglish. Or rather, it's kind of like where the laying of the groundwork for what needs to be done in Anglish happens.
Yes, as someone who is also an Anglish hobbyist I think you do get a lot of merger of sound in updated OE to modE words. However, I don't think it makes Anglish pointless, as there are literally thousands of OE words ripe for renewal when you consider the usage of suffixes and prefixes to distinguish meaning. This I also employ when calque-ing new words, science words, for example. For-, Be-, Y-, a-, ed-, eft-, -and, -en, -wist, -red, etc. Let's keep Anglish alive!
@@leod-sigefast true dat
In my language, Swedish, we have the ship/sheep situation but for every vowel sound. Each vowel has a long and a short equivalent, but they are also distinguished by exact vowel quality. "Food" Mat [mɑːt] vs. "Matte" Matt [mat], "Ugly" Ful [fʉːl] vs. "Drunk" Full [fɵlː], etc. Altogether it's 17-18 vowel phonemes, no diphthongs.
I listen to every video. You are brilliant. Listening from St Louis, Missouri, USA. I've been studying the history of the English language since age 14. Thank you for these videos and please continue them.
Whoa, I wasn't expecting I'd learn an obscure pronunciation rule that is particularly relevant to me as an ESL speaker. Since my native tongue makes phonemic distinction between long and short vowels, I've repeatedly tripped over myself when a supposedly long vowel such as /iː/ gets cut short when followed by an unvoiced consonant and vice versa. I've sorta figured this out on my own albeit subconsciously when speaking off the cuff, but I was constantly overcorrecting myself. So I was right all along, which gives me a kick of ego boost.
Good thing understanding language has a lot to do with context or we'd all have a hard time telling the subtle differences between words or sounds whether native or non-native. I'm a non-native speaker and I also heard shape like a lot of others in the comment section even though I knew I was supposed to hear either ship or sheep. On second listen, trying to tell whether it was ship or sheep it sounded like a drawn-out ship to me. I find that a lot of what helps me understand different English accents is getting used to the 'rhythm' in how people speak so that even if the words they say sound vastly different due to accent between the rhythm and context I can still understand what is said. I thought your exercise felt more like that to me oddly enough. As if I was trying to understand an accent rather than a word specifically if any of this even makes sense. I'm self-taught and moved to a lot of regions with very different English accents (Scotland, England, US) so I think it's just the odd way I compensated to be able to understand some of the very thick accents I encountered that even native speakers seem to struggle with, Rab C Nesbitt comes to mind.
As a little fun fact, the word for ship in Norwegian, "skip", is pronounced exactly like sheep /ʃiːp/
Another fun addition to that. Scip, the Norse version of ship, as you say, was borrowed into the Romance languages, becoming all the words like equipe, equipo, equipment etc. These were then borrowed into English, equipment. Skip, was also borrowed into English as sea captain: Skipper.
Unlike the Swedes, who pronounce it like "khfip" or somesuch
@@leod-sigefast In Old English it was spelt "scip" and I read that it should be pronounced "ship".
In Dutch we still have the relationship between open and closed vowels, and specific spelling rules for that.
Bet, bait --> e, ee
Ship, sheep --> i, ie
Bot, boat --> o, oo
The rules we use for open vowels is:
- if it comes at the end of a syllable, the vowel is open
- if the letter is repeated, the vowel is open
- in other cases, the vowel is closed
So you have:
bek (e),
beek (ee),
beker (ee), --> be-ker
lekker (e) --> lek-ker
The short version of uu (like in lute), is hard to find an example word for. You can have a word like "stuck", but 90% of English speakers pronounce it as "stahk".
The long version of a (like in luck) is very hard for Americans to say. They'll say "Ahmereekahhhn", instead of "Aamereekaan". I have never heard an English word pronounced with an aa.
Writing oe, like in "food" makes also a ton of sense. "OE" is in between "oh" and "eh", if you alternate between the two very rapidly you'll hear yourself saying oooh.
Same with how we write "ie" like in "feet". Alternate between "ih" and "eh", and you'll hear yourself say eeee.
Of course we have a lot of loan words that we write in the original spelling, so exceptions abound. There is the issue that if we would loan the english word "have", we would write it as "hef", which will be a short "eh", not the "e:h". We don't have the custom to put a "v" at the end of a word, so we can't do that. No way to write a drawn out closed vowel. Thus, a lot of foreign spelling in Dutch.
Watching this video, I had to think of the time, a former french co-worker was telling us about her holiday at the "beach" ;)
Hehe, a French pianist talking English with an "outrageous accent" was explaining his next piece to a German audience. A very long and very emotional explanation.
And the title was "Ze Bitch"...
'Spain has the best beaches'
As a non-native speaker, I dodge that word in favour of shore, seaside, strand, bay.
Human languages are so rich and have vast reservoirs of redundancy to exploit. :-)
Simon Roper 😁
My friend, a native Korean speaker, always says _beach_ as _beeeech,_ making the vowel sound _really_ long, so that he doesn’t mispronounce it with a short _i._
I teach EFL to Spanish speakers and often, they have difficulty pronouncing certain voiced final consonants. The presence of vowel lengthening is very strong in my accent (Inland North, I'd definitely agree that any phonemic vowel length pales in comparison to rule-governed lengthening), so they've often been able to distinguish minimal pairs by lengthening the preceding vowel. So the distinction between loose and lose becomes /lus/ and /lu:s(:)/ instead of /lus/ and /luz/. They do often voice the final sound but inconsistently and the vowel differentiation helps achieve sound discrimination.
quick edit: that recovery strategy actually reminds me of Friulian, which gained phonemic vowel length after those final consonants devoiced, leaving the vowel length alone.
I don't think you can post links here, but there's a question on the English language Stack Exchange called "are 'horse' and 'whores' homophones?" and there is a long explanation of the fact that the "S" in "whores" SOUNDS voiced to us because of vowel length but actually isn't.
@@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77 It's an interesting question, and I've had a look at some (but not all) of the commentary. I think the one thing that is being missed that in /hɔːs/ the voicing is terminated before onset of the /s/, but in /hɔːz/ it carries on through the onset of the /z/, although it does tend to trail off.
That explains a lot of the spelling hijinks in modern English, at least as far as the vowels go. It's also kind of interesting how you pronounce "I'm" like /ʌ͡ɪm/. In my dialect, we say /aːm/ for "I'm". I wonder how you pronounce the 1PS pronoun "I" because there it drops to /ʌ͡ɪ/ for me. The strut vowel is very interesting and might make a great video on its own.
I‘m an Australian primary school teacher who sometimes teaches primary school German. It‘s always been hard trying to teach children the pronunciation of the German colour: rot (red). In German it‘s pronounced more like the English word wrought than rot. Thanks for the tip Simon. 😊
In my midwestern, nongreat lakes accent, wrought and rot are pronounced identically.
Another fascinating video- I'm reading Tolkien again, and your videos are helping me polish up my Quenya!
what do you think of analyzing australian english (which might be able to be extended to england english?) as having phonemic vowel length (but not with traditional pairs):
bid /bid/ beard /biːd/
ed /ed/ aired /eːd/
lad /læd/ bad /bæːd/
rod /ɹɔd/ roared /ɹɔːd/ (this one the quality does differ a bit)
took /tʊk/ tour /tʊː/
hut /hɐt/ heart /hɐːt/
im an american english speaker who talks frequently to my australian english speaking dad and yeah, a lot of words are distinguished by vowel length, especially cause of the dropped r
Probably replace lad and bad with can (verb) and can (noun), which are proper minimal pairs.
Also /bɪd/ and /bɪːd/ please, /i/ is a distinct phoneme and it just really hurts my poor fragile soul seeing this misrepresented.
But yeah Australian Vowel Length is pretty cool.
@@kawadamashyuu i mean australian short i is closer to [i] and the FLEECE vowel is more like a diphthong like [ɪi] or [ɘi] so i just used that
As an Australian, I have pretty much the same distinctions, though my vowels are somewhat different in quality, participating in a chain shift, caused by the lowering of the trap vowel.
i → ɪ, e →ɛ, æ → a, ɐ→ ɑ
Also, ʊ may be fronted to a central vowel, but this is somewhat variable. This results in:
bid /bɪd/ beard /bɪːd/
ed /ɛd/ aired /ɛːd/
lad /lad/ bad /baːd/
rod /ɹɔd/ roared /ɹɔːd/ (both mid, though rod is slightly lower and more centralised than roared, but if I drawl it out, it can easily be mistaken for roared. This is almost there with a merger in quality)
took /tʊk/ tour /tʊː/
hut /hɑt/ heart /hɑːt/
I am a young speaker in an upper-middle-class background and live in Canberra, for context. I generally sound on the posher side of Australian English.
I’ll never forget the Italian that spoke good English and migrated to Australia. When he found he couldn’t understand what was being said, he said he was not prepared for the “wang wang” language.
Great video! Such an interesting topic! Totally agree with you that the defining difference between /i:/ and /ɪ/ is quality and not length.
Just a detail, the transcription of "feeling" should be /ˈfiːlɪŋ/, with the velar nasal rather than the /ng/
So many wonderful nuggets of gold in that video
I was in a bar in the Kansai region and some Japanese people started chatting me and my friend up in Japanese, asking how long we'd been there, were we students, had we visited anywhere in Japan. My friend said oh yeah, we traveled around the Kansai area: Nara, Kyoto, Osaka... "Where?" "Osaka." "Huh? I've never heard of that, where's that?" "What?? It's...a really famous big city!" "Really?" So I chimed in "Ōsaka". "Ooooh, Ōsaka! Why didn't you say so!"
In their defense they were a bit drunk, but still, this is the story I use to explain why distinguishing vowel length in Japanese is important.
Italian has vowel length but is allophonic, vowels are pronounced long in open syllables (I pronounce them long before r followed by a consonant different from r and word finally. This is common but I believe that not all speakers do it)
Fato /ˈfa.to/ [ˈfaːto] (fate)
Fatto /fat.to/ [ˈfat̚.to] (done)
Arto /ar.to/ [aːr.to] (arm)
Alto /al.to/ [alto] (tall)
Like in Scots this is phonemic but pronouncing the vowel always short will give you an accent
I don't know about fato, but pronouncing arto with a short a kind of reminds me of the accents of south americans
That's my problem with Italian, I've studied it a bit by myself (can't understand/read pretty much 100%) but have never really practiced speaking and I would have no idea how to pronounce the long vowels in a natural way without making them sound short. Thank god French doesn't have them anymore
'Bin'' and 'been' ( both as 'bin' ) in Norfolk accents are often the same. As with ' bear' and 'beer' ( both as 'bear' ) or 'hair' and 'here' ( both as 'hair ) and numerous other examples: also the 'stone' example would be 'stun' and 'stone' the same, both as 'stun' - though also many Norfolk accents though sounding the same, have different vowel sounds depending on area of the county, so many in Norfolk have longer vowel on O, eg stone can be more like 'stooone', same with 'moooment' This can be observed in the famous Norfolk word 'bor' used like 'mate' in Norfolk and derived from the Germanic 'boer' etc, meaning farmer, peasant farmer.
In the West of the county it gets stunted to 'buh' and totally non-shotic - Whilst more east it is 'boorr' .
- Would love to see a video on the Norfolk ( and Suffolk, accents ) which a trove of archaic-ness, perhaps more to the Middle English period I guess. Though there are some older characteristics there also. I think if you read some Shakespeare in a Norfolk accent, it will still rhyme :-)
Towel and tile are also pronounced the same around the east Norfolk area, and end up sounding like 'taahl'. 'Hour' ends up sounding like 'are' and 'tower' ends up as 'tar'. It's an interesting accent for those from abroad I can imagine.
@@noahlaws531 Another Naarfaak ol bor I see ;-) Do yew bin a troshin ol buh - another couple of nice things lost since the old boys in the 1980s is the use of 'hine' for 'him' which is cognate with 'ihn' (German) and 'hann' (Icelandic) and the pronuciation of V as a W as in 'Willage' for 'Village'. :-)
American here (from Maryland, but it probably doesn't matter). I do think certain vowels are pronounced longer than others, and it's significant enough that you can notice it and use it to help figure out what word it was- but at the end of the day, if someone disregarded those patterns I wouldn't think they said anything wrong (and would most likely not even notice). The most significant example you had that definitely happens in my dialect is the distinction between vowels before voiced/voiceless consonants.
Oh, and I noticed that I pronounce my sister's name, Natalie, with a very short initial a, almost a tap. In fact, I pronounce all three vowels (/æ/, /ə/, and /i/ for me) really short. But other people _really_ draw that first a out, and I don't think that's wrong at all! It sounds completely normal to me- I just don't do that. I probably rush though it cause I'm used to saying her name super fast?? maybe
It‘s all about parsing. Parsing ist the transformation of a serial structure into a tree structure of a relational tree. Interestingly the parser structures are shifting over time. „Merry Mary married.“ is for a German native speaker easy to decompose. Following Wolfgang Köhler‘s bouba-kiki effect, that language, that there is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of Objects, we have one entry point for analyzing vowels in a more brain prone manner. „Tar“ and German „kleben“ inherit the sluggish and slowly feature of being glued. Because this is not always the case, we evade in thinking, that language is a random selection. For me is the most interesting development in modern English the disintegration of literal spelling and vocal pronunciation. It still goes on: Even „tear“ and „tear“ can be vocalized differently, depending on context. In „tearing apart“ we revisit the tenacity of „tar“.
such an interesting video!! i didn't even know that there was sometimes a spoken difference in other english dialects of words like "merry" and "Mary"!! also i always like your attempts at an american accent because it sounds very very southern lol
Our southern accent is probably our closest to an English accent anyway
véreb (bloodhound)
veréb (sparrow)
dráhy (roads, often railroads)
drahý (dear, expensive)
Both Hungarian and Czech have distinctive vowel length and nondistinctive stress, which is normally on the first syllable of a word.
For many Hiberno-English speakers, there is a length difference between the low front vowel in 'mass effect' versus 'going to Mass'
With the “rot” and “wrought” example, I pronounce the vowels the same, but the Rs are different. Starting from these different Rs, the vowels tend to have a slightly different tonality because my mouth started in a different shape.
At the same time, Hungarians are also conveniently taught that we have a “short e” as in “Eger” [‘ɛgɛr], a historical town in Hungary, and a “long e” as the first vowel in “éger” [‘e:gɛr], “alder”, or the second one in “egér” [‘ɛge:r]. In fact, the “short e” is [ɛ], while the “long e” is [e:], which is always twice as long as [ɛ], but they are also different in quality. This simplification is also used for “a” and “á”: “alma” [‘ɒlmɒ] “apple” vs. “álma” [‘a:lmɒ] “his/her/its dream” vs “almát” [‘ɒlma:t] “apple-accusative” vs “álmát” [‘a:lma:t] “his/her/its dream-accusative]. - And then try to separate stress (always on the first syllable) from “vowel length” because in Hungarian stress does not “make” the vowel “long”: you can have [‘a:] as well as [a:], [‘ɒ] as well as [ɒ]. See the examples above.
I’m a native English (and Spanish, dual learning) speaker, and I can hear and mimic the spoken vowel differences in all the words, but I don’t pronounce them like that in my own speech. “Merry” and “Mary” are almost indistinguishable. During the experiment, I was sure the word was “SHAPE”, but I can hear the other variances.
I find the way you looked at the Scottish vowel environment thing very interesting. As a linguistics student (and a speaker of a Midwest accent that isn’t Great Lakes), I leaned that in *Standard American English, a vowel followed by a voiceless consonant is short, but followed by a voiced consonant is long.
In my accent, as well as most of America, say
/biːn/, but /bit/ for Bean and beet.
In the same way, sheep and ship have the same length for me, being short because of the voiceless environment.
Ship and sheep differ by quality, sheep and she’d differ by length. /ʃɪp/, /ʃip/, and /ʃiːd/. That’s why it’s so interesting to me that the most obvious difference for you is length not quality.
And for me, marry, merry, and Mary are exactly the same. I guess in length because of the same environment, as compared to you. All /æ/ on account of the accent.
And yeah, great video as always.
How do you pronounce beat?
Vowels are usually longer before voiced consonants in English, true. I think the difference is more tangible in American English though where there is more truly a difference between lax and tense vowels than short and long vowels, whereas in an English dialect like Australian English that does distinguish vowel length, the phonemically long vowels are still more obviously long than short vowels before voiced consonants.
Hence Australian English could be said to have four different phonetic vowel lengths (but only two distinct lengths):
eg. but < bud < Bart < bard
As a British English speaker with a southern accent, I heard "sheep" for /ʃɪːp/ (ignoring the possibility of "shape"), while finding "ship" quite hard to hear. Anecdotally, I think that vowel pair is particularly governed by length - I'm not sure I've ever heard /ɪː/ before and I've never recognised it as an "i" sound.
How do you pronounce 'ear'? In my accent it's /ɪː/
native English speaker here and I definitely heard /ʃɪːpʰ/ as shape in a distinctly northern accent
The development of the vowels is interesting. We often talk about the great vowel shift in linguistic circles, but when do you think most of our long vowels became diphthongs? I'm a native English speaker from Canada and the vowels in shape, rude, boat, mate, name etc. are all diphthongs in my accent, but they all sound like one long phoneme in every reenactment of Old or Middle or even Early Modern English that I've heard. Yet they're all diphthongs in the vast majority of native English dialects today.
Good video.
In the UK we distinguish between Mary, marry and merry. All three words are pronounced in three different ways. Apparently there are some American accents where they are all pronounced exactly the same.
I actually heard your lengthened ship as shape. I am a native speaker with a General American accent.
Yeah, I feel like the large difference between General American English and Simon's accent puts the sound in a context that makes it seem different.
Yeah same.
Wtf is wrong with you? lol
this is where the use of the circumflex in Welsh is so handy! The circumflex, commonly called 'to bach' ('small roof' in Welsh) is used to lenghen the vowel (and, remember w and y are vowels in Welsh; w = u; y = schwa and sometimes a soft i; u = is similar to French u in northern Wales, but same as i in the south).
The circumflex is used to show vowel length but only if there is also another word with the same spelling and could cause misunderstanding (though Welsh spelling of English words use the circumflex liberally e.g. jîns (jeans); bîns (beans). So mor (as) is without circumflex, but môr (sea) is with.
The issue with ship and sheep would be sorted by spelling it 'ship' and 'shîp'. Merry/Mary would be 'meri' and Mêri'.
Great Explanation, Simon!!
Would love to hear you talk about New Zealand/Australian English and Upspeak! Great vid btw!
It's still incredibly hard to talk about English vowels because of dialects and the great vowel shift. In my dialect of northern Californian English, all the "merries" are the same, but I don't have the caught/cot distinction, but my vowels for them aren't the typical English ones. It's more like cot with /a/ and caught with /ɑ/. I agree with you that vowel length is not phonemic (/fo'ni:mɪk̚/) and you brought up the best bit of evidence: that, if there are voiced consonants, especially after a short/lax vowel, then it can be longer than a "long" long vowel in the same circumstances. I think, in modern English, the crucial distinction is between tense and lax vowels: tense vowels are long, of a certain quality, and tend to be stressed, while lax vowels are short, of a different quality, and tend to be unstressed. English heavily relies on stress accent, which is not how many languages operate.
7:40 that's something really important that most teachers of EFL not give proper focus. Most students think that if you get the length right you can do poorly with vowel quality when it's usually the other way around.
I'm pretty sure the pitch/note between ship and sheep also differentiates how I expect these words to sound like.
Your ship/sheep example also revealed a difference to my ear in the pronunciation of the 'sh' sound. I hear a deeper, fuller sound in SHip and a somewhat higher, thinner sound in SHeep. As a student of the Polish language, I believe these two sounds approximate to the SZ and Ś sounds in Polish. I'm not a native speaker, so would be interested to hear from any that are.
I think stress also plays a role. Long vowels that happen to occur in unstressed syllables seem to sound shorter.
1:37 I understand the point you’re making, but I feel like you are underselling the importance and usefulness of context. While this may not always work, I feel like anyone listening to you say that sentence would know exactly what you meant.
7:42 sounds like a northern 'shape' ^^
Western American. I thought it sounded like 'shape' too.
English is my second language, but probably because I was already primed and sort of anticipating where you were going I heard ship and sheep respectively.
These videos are my favorites.
I was amazed when I learned that everyone around me pronounces pin and pen differently.
Nonnative speaker here. I've been wondering why your demonstration of SHIP sounded like SHAPE to me and to a fair bit of other people, and maybe there could be one more variable other than the length of the vowel: lack of a guttural stop in your demonstration. I believe in many English accents and dialects single syllable words with the vowel /ɪ/ have a guttural stop before the final consonant, which in this case was /p/, where words like shape don't. Could this be it?
And then, I understood why people looked at me weirdly when I said : " I put my sheet on the beach... "
Thank you so much I have always been confused by the terms long and short vowel sound is completely different now I understand
Native English speaker(midlands area), I heard an accented pronunciation of shape instead of ship, but then again I am dyslexic
I live in Czech Republic where they have e and é and a - á . I'm always being picked up for shortening these vowels, it's just a bit hard for a Scotsman to make longer vowels You said favourite perfectly with a Scottish accent , not sure sure about rake. When you were using your own accent I heard shape!
Cool video. as a factoid, estonian has three letter lengths: short, long, overlong
I imagine that the word one in English also used to have an overlong vowel, if it managed to turn the initial part of its diphtongisation into a semiconsonant
a - aa - ?? How do you write the overlong ones?
@@bacicinvatteneaca sorry I couldn't quite grasp. Do you mean the w sound in the beginning of one so vowel length is clearer?
@@zoria2718 "aa". "aaa" would be cool though. Overlong is a rather recent development of compensating syllable loss at the end of words with elongated first syllables.
Examples (nominative - illative)
(Finnish) Mäki- mäkeen
(Estonian) Mägi - mäkke (high stress on k)
Finnish has also double-vowels like estonian but we are related. We got same words but meaning is different.
I think these technical videos are very interesting!
(And I, a non-native English speaker actually heard "shape" when you said" ship". 😀)
6:54 Nice "hw-", by the way, what dialects have the initial h- in the words written with silent -h- after the initial w-? Is it only a Scottish thing (I read only about it, but heard it from some Americans as well) or it's pronounced this way also in the North British, Irish etc ones?
I wrote the H with two dashes from both sides and youtube decided that I wanted to strike it through. Interesting (c), so one can add styles to the text in comments here, or not?
Test (right: w/o whitespaces):
- h - : -h-
- word -
: -word-
* h * : *h*
_ h _ : _h_
UPD: it works.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9F%A8wh%E2%9F%A9#Wine%E2%80%93whine_merger
@@girv98 Thanks.
Texas has a few accents that still pronounce h
Another fun fact is that if this sound change (glide cluster reduction) progresses further, it will result in a loss of /h/ before /j/, resulting in "yuge," "yuman," etc
Spanish speakers also pronounce beach and ...another word the same
You should do a video on the history of h pronunciation, how it disappeared and reappeared in many dialects.
In AMERICAN English we have vowels becoming shorter before voiceless consonants but also closed syllables as well.
For example: there is a significant phonetic distinction with the vowel /eɪ/. “Bay” [bɛi̯t] is pronounced different from “bait” [bet], so vowel length definitely does affect quality there.
In Spanish we have something that may be similar to a long vowel. This happens when we have a root of a word ending in "-e" and it joins into the "-er" ending of the infinitive form. For example "creer" or "leer" aren't pronounce as if there was only one /e̞/, rather there is a little change in tone (rising) or a slight change in the vowel quality, like /e̞e/. However, if you make no distinction between both vowels it's still normal, so you could have /e̞ː/ in that case.
Verily I am feeling Mary today. And yes, American randomly change vowels even in proper nouns like European place names and given names. Proper nouns require the correct accent and language to be adopted.
East Coast US with time spent in the Midwest. I also heard shape
When you said /ʃı:p/,
as a German speaker,
I heard sheep,
because /ı:/ sounds a quite like /e:/.
I expected some kind of Scottish accent I guess.
Also, Scottish pronunciation is closer to German.
First part: Yes, also more heard sheep than ship.
Second part: With the variety of accents and dialects in Germany, I am not sure one can generalize saying that Scottish is closer to German. And maybe it is due to where I live(d) in Germany and that I am not overly familiar with Scottish, but I cannot think of a German dialect being very close to Scottish. First difference that comes to my mind is the sound for "r", as an example.
@Jack Ketch Correct, Scottish is more conservative in pronunciation than modern English, closer to middle English. Modern English (let alone American dialects) vowel qualities are fairly odd compared to other Germanic dialects. Every conservative English dialect sound more familiar to us than modern English.
@Jack Ketch OK, maybe so. For me, Scottish does not seem to be more easy to pronounce than RP English. However, that is for one surely depending on what German dialect(s) I can speak and secondly on what few I know about Scottish pronounciation. Maybe it is a different story the other way around.
One thing that people never seem to talk about with English vowel length is that different vowels behave quite differently (or is it just my accent? I'm from Merseyside, though outside of Liverpool and without a strong Scouse accent---but I've never noticed much in the way of differences in vowel length behaviour when listening to people from different regions of England)
Sure, my high vowels behave much as you describe: they're long before voiced consonants, short before voiceless consonant (and word-finally). Maybe they're a little longer than other short vowels when short, but it's not an easily noticeable difference for me, whereas this difference here is. In terms of perception, an ultra-short [ʃip] certainly sounds like "sheep", although [ʃɪːp] doesn't really sound like anything else, it just sounds weird.
A similar alternation occurs with the diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/ which have a long pronunciation with laxed off-glide ([aːɪ], [aːʊ]) before voiced consonants (and word-finally! unlike the high vowels) and a short tense pronunciation ([aj], [aw]) before voiceless consonants (with one exception: short tense [aw] also occurs before "dark" /l/).
But none of the other monophthongs or diphthongs alternate in this way (not to an extent that I can clearly notice, anyhow). The three vowels /ɜː/, /ɑː/, /ɔː/ (I don't have /ɛː/ because it's merged into /ɜː/ in my accent) seem always about as long as /i/ in "seed", and all the other vowels seem always about as short as /i/ in "seat".
Since I lack /ɛː/, none of the always-long vowels have exactly the same quality as any of the always-short vowels. Nevertheless, perception tests reveal that the quantity is a more significant element in the contrasts than quality for me. If I shorten /ɑː/ to [ɑ] in "sharp", I get something that almost sounds like "shop", definitely more like that than "sharp"; conversely if I lengthen /ɒ/ to [ɒː] in "shop", it sounds like "sharp". Likewise /ɔː/ shortened in "bought" sounds like /ʊ/ in my Northern "but", and /ʊ/ lengthened in "but" makes it sound like "bought". (I'm not very good at identifying back vowels, so it's possible that my /ɔː/ and /ʊ/ are closer to [oː] and [o] than my transcriptions would suggest.) Although it's pretty rare, /ɜː/ can occur in unstressed syllables in words like "transfer" where shortening it would definitely make it sound more like schwa than anything else.
So it seems clear that for my accent, there are three distinct groups of vowel phonemes with respect to length: six in phonemically contrastive short-long pairs (/ɒ/ ~ /ɑː/, /ʊ/ ~ /ɔː/ and /ə/ ~ /ɜː/) with an accompanying quantity difference of secondary importance, four with only an allophonic length alternation (/i/, /u/, /aj/ and /aw/), and the remaining group with no phonetic or phonemic length contrast.
good evening from canada! love your work simon.
Hey Simon I've got an interesting video idea you might like.
A while ago I was talking to a friend about how in HIMYM they have a different actor voicing Ted from the future,however most adults voices dont change,let alone change after 30. We then got talking about how humans identify voices and what makes them unique. Maybe you could do a vid on that topic. Maybe talk about how (mostly English speakers) identify each other solely on voice?
Can we have a video about Australian English?
You aren't a linguist...? Could have fooled me! I love your videos
The same applies to German: Not only the length of the vowel changes but its quality, too. In my language only short and long "a" and "ä" have the same quality. Even the quality of "ü" shifts to a darker tone when becoming short though phonetic transscription ignores that. -- I read this from one Brazilian: "Is it true that "keys" and "kiss" are pronounced the same?"
I love your videos so much. I see that you posted a new video, and I had to drop everything and watch it immediately!
One case I think is interesting is vowel length affecting the perception of voicing or voicelessness later in the word -- the actual distinction, I'm given to understand, between "horse" and "whores," which are actually both pronounced with a voiceless "S."
As a native dutch speaker and writer, this short/long long vowel is literally 1st class school stuff, since it also directly affects spelling.
Kiwi here - definitely heard shape in a scottish accent, I’d never think of that as ship in my own.
You, sir, make great videos. Just subscribed. :)
Dutch traditionally has a system where the quality differs as well as the quantity, very similar to what you suggest late Middle English may have had. But modern loanwords have introduced vowels that break the automatic length assignment: the English loanword "lease" has a long vowel distinct from "lies", but also distinct in quality from "lis". This seems to indicate that vowel length distinctions were lost and then reintroduced, albeit at a marginal level. Are there any cases of this happening in English?
As a New Englander, I pronounce merry and Mary like you do. Most Americans merge those sounds, though.
Can anyone explain why some Scots roll on the r's and some do not? The accent in the Highlands seem to be much heavier than in the Lowlands?
To me it seems that originally in some older phase of English the difference was likely the vowel length, because in the continental Germanic languages it usually is. Well, I'm not sure of Dutch and Frisian, and those are the closest cousins to English. It's a physiological tendency, taht the long vowels tend to be said more clearly, or more in the extremities of the mouth cavity, because they have more time to reach the extremes. And this is even further typical in languages where the stressed syllable (and vowel) are strongly said, like mainly in English dialects - especially compared to the unstressed ones, which English tends to blur.
Yet the great vowel shift much blurred this, because the i vowel in /pine/ used to be something close to 'peen', so it was the long vowel, compared to pin etc. This is still how most of the Germanic languages do them. Plus besides the vowel shift, Celtic languages have affected English pronunciation, because since the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England, they started to mix with the Celts. They were not 'ethnically cleansed', but gradually adapted the new ruling language - the Anglo-Saxons were the upper cast, and the country was run with their language. Then came the Normans, and the celtic langues in the west and North got breathing time, when English became a lower class language herself. Until the Normans had blendid with the Normans (and Celts) by the Colonial time. The 100 years war with France was likely a motivational push for the Normans to become truely English. Yet their accent affected English as well - and French like Spanish, doesn't need to distinguish long and short vowels - the length is more like just one of the signs of stress.
So both the Celtic substratum and Norman French superstratum likely affected to English not using the length as a distinguishing feature of the vowels, at least mainly. Noteworthy is also that the tendency is even stronger in the USA, maybe because the Northern English accents became the dominant there, in the Northern States. Plus the multitude of immigrants from many cultures may have supported the tendency. I think most languages don't use length as a phonemic difference, so to separate meanings, like in Simon's dialect merry vs. Mary.
My dialect (North-Central American English) uses vowel length in a way completely different to yours.
Firstly, the traditional long vowels have shortened, becoming the same length as their "short" counterparts.
Secondly, when a vowel, be it a phoneme or part of a diphthong, is preceded by itself or its semivowel counterpart, the two sounds combine into a single long vowel. This means that at a phonetic level, the only difference between, for example, sure [ʃɚ] and surer [ʃɚː] is vowel length.
Very interesting video in a variant of the Dutch language in Belgium called Flemish Limburgser there is i difference between long and short vowels.
My Russian partner always argues with me over English vowel sounds, where he would argue ship and sheep, for example, are the same.
Well, it's simply because in Russian only
/i/ is a phoneme, and [ɪ] occurs only in unstressed position (unlike English, where both /i/ and /ɪ/ are phonemes), so a native Russian speaker can't distinguish [i] and [ɪ] unless they had the training (say, a course of practical phonetics of English).
I'm an american english speaker, specifically from the midwest. I find in my accent I don't mke distinctions between long and short vowels. The Mary/merry bit near the beginning is interesting, because I can hear it in a birtish english accent, but I don't think I make the distinction myself. I think midwestern americans are often accused of speaking "quickly", and I weonder how much of that reaction comes from losing the distinction between short and long vowels.
I've also had a few beers at this point so.... excuse my merry ramblings if they don't make any sense :)
Non-native English-speaker here: To me, the main difference between "ship" and "sheep" is the vowel length. Sure, the vowel quality is slightly different, but to me, the main difference is vowel length. In my native Hungarian, short vowels are supposed to be laxed, but not as much as in English.
Also, when you said "ship" in your own accent, it sounded like "shape" to me. Yes, I pronounce the "ay"-vowel as [eː] and [eːj], depending on context.
Saying the vowels the same is a mistake.
In Norwegian we have double and single consonants in writing, which is taught as if it controls the stress of the word. That's just wrong. You'd imagine it corresponds to consonant length (which it probably did in old Norse), but today it mostly controls wowel length on the preceding vowel. The rule seems to be that a double consonant makes the preceding vowel short even if it otherwise would be long. Consonant length just tends to be longer if stressed, or after a short vowel no matter how it's written.
The problem is that in many dialects consonants can in fact be long independent of surrounding vowels, making the double consonant rules very hard to learn.
It would really be much better if we marked long vowels that deviate from the standard rythm, and dropped double consonants altogether.