Talk:Length (phonetics)

Obscure passage

I'm copy pasting the following to this talk page. It was added to the section pointing out that in "certain languages, however, there are pairs of sounds that are traditionally considered to be long-short pairs of the same sound even though they really consist of different sounds":

"This is particular problematic when the speakers of such languages cannot hear the distinction, e.g. English /ou/ vs. /o/ or /o:/ in other languages."

-- j. 'mach' wust ^{ˈæ̞wːæ̞ː} 08:18, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

Circular definition

In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that are distinctively longer than other sounds.

This begs the question: what does "longer" mean here? Are we talking about duration, or something more subtle? --Doradus (talk) 14:17, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Clicking through to other articles, it does seem that duration is the key. I've reworded the opening sentence accordingly. --Doradus (talk) 14:20, 13 January 2012 (UTC)