On 2006-09-16 23:44, Patrick Ryan wrote:
> Some time ago, we had some discussion on this list of an alleged
> phenomenon whereby English vowels were reputed to be lengthened by a
> following voiced consonant.
>
> This appears to me, at this time, to be incorrect.
>
> I am wondering if those who asserted it might be kind enough to cite
> references — if they can.
I could give you a long list of references. For English, the phenomenon
was first observed by James Elphinston in 1765, thoroughly investigated
by Henry Sweet more than a hundred years ago and measured instrumentally
by E. A. Meyer (1903). It's been studied in hundreds of publications
since (it doesn't matter on which side of the Atlantic or which side of
the equator), and anyone who has done any laboratory phonetics will only
shrug if you call it "alleged". Take any handbook of experimental
phonetics, look at examples of speech spectrograms, and you will see the
phenomenon with your own eyes if your ears fail you. Better still, you
can download a speech-analyser such as Praat
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
and experiment with your own speech if you suspect all phoneticians are
quacks.
See e.g.
Chen, M. 1970. "Vowel length variation as a function of the voicing of
the consonant environment". Phonetica 22: 129-159.
Piotr