Thanks for going into that - so in (ancient) Greek, were there words which were the same as each other but for syllable length? Your mention of syllable length being the basis of meter in poetry makes sense, but this is often the case in English too, while English music allows us poetic license to tweak away from the norm.
I also think you're slightly wrong (or at least exaggerated) in saying that in English "you can't change which syllable is emphasized more than very rarely or it sounds like nonsense". If you take a piece of music and then alter this then sure, but actually the emphasis will often be slightly different to how it would be spoken. I wanted to double check on this belief, and thought about it while listening to Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" (which was already playing) and Stanford's Magnificat in G to add a different genre, in both cases the emphasis is often on different syllables to how we would speak it if we just saw the text without knowing the music.
Anyway, thanks again for the reply, I guess it falls (at least to an extent) into the "simplified for the BBC audience", which is much preferable to the alternative of "it's bullshit". :)
edit: Here's the Stanford piece (with music+lyrics if you're not familiar with the text already): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7UorDdRg60 Was just a random picking off the top of my head (added bonus that it's, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful things ever written)
> so in (ancient) Greek, were there words which were the same as each other but for syllable length?
Yes, of course. I know very little classical greek, but here's an example from Latin:
malum - adjective, "bad"
maalum - noun, "apple" (I've written the long 'a' as two 'a's, which is not normal practice).
Contrastive vowel length is a very normal language feature; consider modern Japanese.
> I wanted to double check on this belief, and thought about it while listening to Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" (which was already playing) and Stanford's Magnificat in G to add a different genre, in both cases the emphasis is often on different syllables to how we would speak it if we just saw the text without knowing the music.
Modern songs and (especially) poetry vary in quality in how well the natural rhythm of their language fits the rhythm they're set to (there's no particular reason to believe that this only occurs in the modern day). It's definitely true that there's a lot of material that doesn't do that well, but I personally find that sort of thing jarring, and ovrwhelmingly the rhythm of the language and the rhythm of the piece are compatible. Given a large enough corpus, it's quite possible to figure out what rhythm(s) a word really wants to have.
Finally, remember how I said that marking vowel length in writing was not normal practice at the time? You might be interested to know that we know the vowel lengths in Latin words from their use in poetry.
Fun side note -- there's a famous Latin poet called Ovid; his name in Latin is Ovidius (four syllables: O-vi-di-us). All of those vowels are short. The last syllable is easily malleable, as it's a case ending, but the fact that the three syllables before it are all short means that Ovid is always referred to in poetry by a nickname, since Latin poetry essentially never allows for three short syllables in a row.
Those are in fact the standard ways I was taught, in an English-speaking Latin class, to pronounce short i ("hit") and long i ("heat"). But that isn't necessarily historically accurate.
It's definitely worth noting here that the english words "hit" and "heat" are felt by native speakers to use two different vowels (referred to as "vowel quality"), whereas the Latin "occido" and "occido" were felt to use the same vowel, in different lengths (referred to, oddly enough, as "vowel length"). That's why they're spelled the same.
Similarly, Japanese kana don't have different symbols for the short and long versions of their various vowels. Long vowels use the symbol for a short vowel, followed by a length mark.
English does use differing vowel lengths, but english vowel length is fully determined by other things; it doesn't vary freely. A standard example would be that the vowel in "made" is longer than the vowel in "mate".
The "long" and "short" used in English classes (not Linguistics) usually refers to the presence of a "silent e" and the lack of "silent e", but this terminology does not necessarily match up to a phonetic long and short vowel.
I remember hearing an argument in a linguistics class that for English oral stop consonants ("p","b","t","d","k" and "g" at the end of a syllable), the primary source of differentiation between minimal pairs, like "made" and "mate", is vowel length and that they are all devoiced.
I'm aware of the English-class terminology, but interestingly enough the guy bringing up "hit" and "heat" wasn't using that, as "heat" would be described under that system as having a long E, not a long I.
It's definitely plausible to me that (when the word is pronounced in isolation) word-final stop consonants are all devoiced. I haven't looked into the question at all and don't plan to, so I'm basically just spitballing. But my vocal tract can definitely start running down before I entirely finish speaking.
However, a much bigger issue than distinguishing "hid" from "hit" is distinguishing "hip" (where the final stop has become a glottal stop) from "hit" (ditto). I was under the impression that in general there isn't necessarily any phonetic difference at all there. If the argument you mention was only referring to minimal pairs with the same place of articulation, that sounds more reasonable.
I think final glottalization is a definite possibility, but I don't think it is a huge issue for native speakers given that context and word usage will resolve it for the most part.
្The /I/ in "hit" and the /i/ in "heat" are two different vowels.
When linguists say that a language has minimally contrastive vowel length, they mean that a single vowel can be pronounced with either a short or long duration, resulting in totally different words.
So in Khmer...
យឹត /jɨt/ means "to scold"
and
យឺត /jɨɨt/ means "slow"
A long vowel is indicated typically in the IPA either by doubling the vowel symbol as I did above or by placing a macron on the vowel (a line over the top, as in /ā/).
As was mentioned, the terms "long vowel" and "short vowel" learned in English class are misleading and bear no reality to the duration of English vowels.
I also think you're slightly wrong (or at least exaggerated) in saying that in English "you can't change which syllable is emphasized more than very rarely or it sounds like nonsense". If you take a piece of music and then alter this then sure, but actually the emphasis will often be slightly different to how it would be spoken. I wanted to double check on this belief, and thought about it while listening to Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" (which was already playing) and Stanford's Magnificat in G to add a different genre, in both cases the emphasis is often on different syllables to how we would speak it if we just saw the text without knowing the music.
Anyway, thanks again for the reply, I guess it falls (at least to an extent) into the "simplified for the BBC audience", which is much preferable to the alternative of "it's bullshit". :)
edit: Here's the Stanford piece (with music+lyrics if you're not familiar with the text already): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7UorDdRg60 Was just a random picking off the top of my head (added bonus that it's, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful things ever written)