The Stability of Distinctive Vowel Lengthin Thai

Many languages have phonological distinctions of quantity in consonants or vowels or both. Among them, Italian is known for its word-medial intervocalic short and long consonants, while Pattani Malay (Abramson, 1987) has word-initial prevocalic short and long consonants. Swedish, some dialects of German, and Thai have short and long vowels. Finnish has a length distinction for both consonants and vowels. Such distinctive length in segments is to be distinguished, of course, from other communicatively relevant roles oftiming in speech, e.g., in stress and intonation. The obvious physical correlate of the length distinction in phonetic segments is relative duration. That is, in the simplest case, the articulatory configuration is held longer for the "long" segment than for the "short" one. Limiting our attention here to vowels, we note an important observation made by Daniel Jones (1950, p. 28): "In languages where vowel length is significant it very often happens that the quality of a long vowel is not quite the same as that of the corresponding short vowel." Ilse Lehiste (1970, pp. 30-33) amplifies the point by commenting that in "quantity" languages some differences in the phonetic quality of short and long vowels can he observed, although such languages differ somewhat in the amount of correlation between length and quality. To the

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