Re: Janácek (Was: Re: "Hamtram[i]ck")

Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 23:38:14 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
> <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> [nb]
> >> Finally, the last name of the composer Leos JanáÄ*ek is apparently
> >> universally mispronounced in the classical music community in the USA;
> >> we accent the first syllable.
>
> Good grief; all I did was key in an a-acute, and look at the mess! My
> default send encoding is utf-8, which might confuse the ASCII-only paths.
>
> [PD]
> > The stress is on the first syllable, but the vowel of the second
> > syllable is long.
>
> Shockingly-ignorant question, but this is a very civil place: In this
> context, does "long" imply relatively-long time duration? I assume so.
> It seems to me that sometimes the vowel in "pot" is sometimes called
> "short", and that in "oaf", "long", but I suspect such usage is by the
> phonetically-untrained (which I am, for the most part). I also have
> Japanese vowels in mind.
>
> I like places where there is "no such thing as a stupid question",
> although I don't think that applies exactly to Qalam; it's more that Qalam
> is civilized. :)
>
> Thanks!

There really was a reason, long ago, why "dictionary pronunciations"
assigned the labels "long" and "short" to the vowels the way they did,
but those uses for quality-of-vowel aren't used in linguistics; "long"
and "short" to us really do refer to the durations of segments.

In Finnish (ObQalam) they make it easy for you by actually writing two
vowels or two consonants when they want you to pronounce them long.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...