[KS] Re: Long vs short vowels in verb and adjective conjugations‏

[Stefan Ewing]

Thanks to Ri Hwasu for your reply, and to Dr. King for the follow-up. > As Ri Hwasu noted, the general take by 'descriptive' (as opposed to prescriptive) linguists of Korean is that vowel length is dead (or at least, has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel). That would seem to be my impression, but as alluded to in the back-and-forth emails, this may be something that varies between dialects.  My uneducated, uninformed, first-hand empirical observation seems to suggest that vowel length is still an important distinctive, at least in the Gyeongsang region...or at the very least, within Daegu.  In some cases, when I have mispronounced a word and the listener finally understands and repeats the word back to me, the difference I often hear between how I said it and they say it is in the length of a vowel.  (If so, it's because they do things differently down there.  I also don't use the informal polite "-yo" ending, since I was told years ago by my Daegu connection that it's unbecoming of my gender.  No doubt it's changing, though, even down there....)
 > The only Koreans who have ever called me on vowel length have been KBS TV announcers (and of a senior generation, at that) and.... The transformation of professional speech seems to be a universal phenomenon, for better (no more BBC announcers with highly clipped RP accents) or worse (the garbled diction of some younger CBC announcers, compared to their elders).
 
> If Koreans aren't understanding your Korean sometimes, chances are it's something else besides vowel length! Truer words were never spoken!  But *if* vowel length is still a bigger factor in the provinces than it is in Seoul, then it's one more thing that I need to conscientiously address.  (At least I have the pitch accent more or less down....)Thanks,Stefan Ewing
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