Jens:
>> Phonetics and phonemics are different things.
>
> Wow.
Yeah, wow, eh? Sometimes I like to state the obvious because people
obviously forget it.
> No, if the pronuncation really was that way, the phonemes involved
> are really /setstos/.
?? That's like saying, "If the pronunciation of /speak/ were really
that way, then inaspirate /p/ would be a seperate phoneme from
/pH/. Erh. No. It's simply called allophony and you learn it in
first year linguistics.
> There is another Danish example of multiple degrees of length,
> [...]
> Now, besides /sba/ we have:
>
> II. /sba:/ <spare> '(to) save, spare'
> III. /sba::/ <sparer> prs. 'save(s), spare(s)', '(a) saver'
> (one who saves money on a savings account).
> IV. /sba:::/ <sparere> pl. 'savers' (who save money on a savings
> account).
Again, I don't get what you're trying to prove. You're claiming that
there is a contrast of length, and yes, this is true phonetically
from the above examples.
However, phonemically, there would be no /a:::/ from these examples.
Clearly! What you have is something like /spa:-a/ and /spa:-a-a/
which are phonetically realized as what seems to be [sba::] and
[sba:::]. So we see that /a/ is a phoneme and /a:/ is another phoneme
but where [a::] arises, it is inevitably a combination of the two
aforementioned phonemes when put side-by-side by whatever morphological
process happens to string them together.
So back to the first sentence: Phonetics and phonemics are different
things.
Don't just "wow" it. Accept it. From the above, it looks as though
you haven't grasped this simple principle and I'm not sure why.
= gLeN