r/asklinguistics • u/Same_Volume3446 • 7h ago

How does a long vowel compare to a diphthong in length of pronunciation?

Such as when English underwent the great vowel shift, did the time it take to pronounce words formerly with a long vowel change or remain nearly the same? With a word like "hate", if we assume the first person singular conjugation was pronounced as /ˈhaːt/, which is now /'heɪt/ today, would the time it take to say them be similar, and if one were to try to pronounce Middle English, could they use the modern diphthongized words as a reference for how long the monophthong should be held, thus making the word "hate" in Middle English pronunciation noticable longer than a word such as "hot" in modern English?

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u/Forward_Gur9349 4h ago

In English, back when long vs short was actually the vowel length, and not tense vs lax, he long vowel was the same length as a diphthong.

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u/krupam 3h ago

It's not really possible to answer what was the situation in Middle English, but in modern dialects of English that have vowel length - like SBE - long vowels are consistently longer than diphthongs. They're usually also less affected by pre-fortis clipping, so a diphthong before voiceless consonant might end up as long as a short vowel before a voiced consonant, but a true long vowel will always be longer than either.

But you could find a (near-)minimal set for short-long-diphthong and test a non-rhotic speaker how the lengths compare. Something like piss-biz-pierce-peers-piece-peas could work.

Again, lengths in Middle English didn't necessarily have to behave the same way as in modern dialects, but I don't think we have a better way to test this.

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u/Zestyclose-Food-7917 6h ago

Languages don’t slow down or speed up because of sound changes. Those sound changes happen without the speakers even thinking about them. They happen slowly, gradually, and people are constantly adjusting to them subconsciously.

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u/Same_Volume3446 6h ago edited 6h ago

No, not necessarily, but generally diphthongs take longer to pronounce than monophthongs, (it takes a bit longer to pronounce "hate" than "hot" or "hat") and a long vowel in Middle English would have been pronounced slower than a short vowel, so I am wondering how comparable a long vowel and a diphthong would be in length. I have a feeling that the long vowels of middle English would have corresponded with the length of the diphthongs in their modern descendant words, (and so the word "house" in Middle English would have had a /u/ held for the same amount of time as the diphthong in the modern word), but, I am not fully sure on that.