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Part of
From West to North Frisia: A Journey along the North Sea Coast
Edited by Alastair Walker, Eric Hoekstra, Goffe Jensma, Wendy Vanselow, Willem Visser and Christoph Winter
[NOWELE Supplement Series 33] 2022
► pp. 409–422

The closed vowels in West Frisian revisited

On the mismatch between phonetic duration and phonological length

| Fryske Akademy | University of Groningen

In most of the literature on West Frisian, it is assumed that this language has a symmetrical vowel system, consisting of nine short and nine corresponding long vowels. These vowels all occur in minimal pairs, meaning that this distinction has phonemic value. This traditional view was challenged in De Haan (1999), where an asymmetrical classification is proposed in which the closed vowels /i/, /y/ and /u/, in spite of their short duration, are considered to be long vowels. In this paper, I want to assess the pros and cons of this asymmetrical classification, add some new arguments in favour of it, and come up with a representation of /i/, /y/ and /u/ which captures both their phonological length and phonetic duration.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.In support of the asymmetrical classification
    • 2.1Arguments pertaining to the distribution of vowels in the phonological word
    • 2.2Phonotactic arguments
    • 2.3A diachronic argument
  • 3.Exceptions
  • 4.The phonological representation of the closed vowels
  • 5.The representation of diphthongs
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 10 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/nss.33.23vis
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