Opinions & Editorials

Spoken English, like most languages, makes great use of semantic and pragmatic vowel length. It is not phonemic, meaning that the word you are saying will not become a different word if you lengthen one vowel, but it’s clearly a part of the way we communicate because most of us actively represent it when we text. In most writing systems, a long vowel is represented by emphasizing a vocalic sign, whether it is a glide consonant that stands for a vowel—such as in Abjads like Hebrew, most Aramaic varieties, and Arabic (these letters are called matres lectionis) — or a character that represents a vowel itself — which is either repeated or somehow embellished with a diacritic or other mark, as is the case in most Roman-based orthographies.