Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombh | Hacker News Reader

I'm British and only learnt this after studying Japanese which encodes vowel length in its writing system, eg, uncle: おじさん, grandfather: おじいさん. I refused to believe that English had vowel length, and was shocked to learn that my ears are actually very capable of hearing it. The other classic example in English is "merry" versus "Mary", but I couldn't find a whole sentence that is distinguished merely by a vowel length, so I made one (at least for my non-rhotic British accent):

    Look how many clothes he shared!
    Look how many clothes he shed!

View on HN

It really depends on your dialect (idiolect?). If you are ocker*, kiwi, or yarpie then vowel length may matter because there can be words with the same vowel sound where only the vowel length changes the meaning. English in Northern England also has vowel length rules (although presumably not often confusing since most speakers are very familiar with English as spoken in the rest of the country).

In New Zealand, can’t and cunt have the same vowel sound, and foreigners can make embarrassing or hilarious errors!

Shed and shared have different vowel sounds in my accent (shared rhymes with ear or air - a diphthong?).

Yes. I have learned that r following a vowel in British English tends to vanish. I remember reading about the pun in the title of Waugh in Africa when I was in my twenties and wondering what the pun was since in my Midwestern American English, Waugh and war are very different sounding words. I encountered a similar one later where a writer friend from England had a scene where a character expressed confusion about pawn shop vs porn shop.

>pawn shop vs porn shop

That one has happened to me IRL.

As a NZer I got thrown when going to California, by asking the front desk staff to do something and then waiting patiently when they said "I can't do that". Turns out when you come from a place where there's a vowel difference between "can" and "can't", that's what you listen for. I didn't at all pick up on the "t" sound at the end.

Here's an American saying and explaining the spoken difference between can and can't:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o_GHV6RTy9c

I agree, it certainly sounds queer to my ear. She says can't has a short vowel, whereas in NZ English it is important that the vowel length is spoken long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com