• HOME
  • Publications
  • BLOG
  • English Phonetics and Phonology
  • The English Pronouncing Dictionary
  • RESOURCES
  Peter Roach

Vowel length and prosody

12/1/2018

0 Comments

 
The Wikipedia coverage of vowels is on the whole pretty comprehensive. In the article on Vowels all the variables that characterize vowels are listed one by one, with the odd exception of vowel length or quantity. To find information on that topic, you have to look further down in the article, to a section entitled Prosody and intonation. Something that immediately looks dodgy about that section is that it carries no references to published material, something that in general Wikipedia does not approve of. A lot of the section is, as you might expect, about stress, tone and intonation, all of which are aspects of speech that I think of as syllable-related, not specifically vowel-related, and all of which are covered comprehensively in other WP articles. It seems to me that basic information on vowel length is relevant and should be retained, but the rest of the material should be removed. However, a sentence in the lead paragraph might perhaps mention that vowels are involved in prosodic variables. What’s left should be re-titled “Vowel quantity” and moved up to be appended to the list of vowel variables.
There is, in fact, a separate WP article on Vowel length, about which I will write some comments later. Meanwhile I will try to tidy up the Vowel article.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

    uArchives

    November 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    March 2019
    April 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    July 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.