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In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may have arisen from one etymologically, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most other dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Finnish, Fijian, Japanese, Old English, and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of dialects of British English, and is said to be phonemic in a few other dialects, such as Australian English, South African English and New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike other varieties of Chinese. Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically, and those that do usually distinguish between short vowels and long vowels. There are very few languages that distinguish three phonemic vowel lengths, for instance Luiseño and Mixe. However, some languages with two vowel lengths also have words where long vowels appear adjacent to other short or long vowels of the same type, e.g. Japanese ''hōō'' "phoenix", Estonian ''jäääärne'' "(on the) edge of the ice", or Ancient Greek ''ἀάατος'' 〔Liddell, H. G., and R. Scott (1996). ''A Greek-English Lexicon'' (revised 9th ed. with supplement). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.1〕 "inviolable". Some languages that do not ordinarily have phonemic vowel length but do permit vowel hiatus may similarly exhibit sequences of identical vowel phonemes that yield ''phonetically'' long vowels, such as Georgian გააადვილებ "you will facilitate it". ==Vowel length and related features== Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels always occur on stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length. This gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long vowel, which is a short vowel found in a syllable immediately preceded by a stressed short vowel, e.g. ''i-so''. Among the languages that have distinctive vowel length, there are some where it may only occur in stressed syllables, e.g. in the Alemannic German dialect and Egyptian Arabic. In languages such as Czech, Finnish or Classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive in unstressed syllables as well. In some languages, vowel length is sometimes better analyzed as a sequence of two identical vowels. In Finnic languages, such as Finnish, the simplest example follows from consonant gradation: ''haka → haan''. In some cases, it is caused by a following chroneme, which is etymologically a consonant, e.g. ''jää'' " ← Proto-Uralic *''jäŋe''. In noninitial syllables, it is ambiguous if long vowels are vowel clusters — poems written in the Kalevala meter often syllabicate between the vowels, and an (etymologically original) intervocalic ''-h-'' is seen in this and some modern dialects (e.g. ''taivaan'' vs. ''taivahan'' "of the sky"). Morphological treatment of diphthongs is essentially similar to long vowels. Interestingly, some old Finnish long vowels have developed into diphthongs, but successive layers of borrowing have introduced the same long vowels again, such that the diphthong and the long vowel again contrast (e.g. ''nuotti'' "musical note" vs. ''nootti'' "diplomatic note"). In Japanese, most long vowels are the results of the phonetic change of diphthongs; ''au'' and ''ou'' became ''ō'', ''iu'' became ''yū'', ''eu'' became ''yō'', and now ''ei'' is becoming ''ē''. The change also occurred after the loss of intervocalic phoneme . For example, modern ''Kyōto'' (Kyoto) exhibits the following changes: /kjauto/ → /kjoːto/. Another example is ''shōnen'' (''boy''): /seuneɴ/ → /sjoːneɴ/ (). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「vowel length」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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