A Comparison of Featural and Structural Analyses of Phonological Length

In this paper we will discuss different analyses of phonological length. In segmental phonology, several features have been proposed to distinguish so-called long vowels, such as /a,i,y,e,o,u/, from so-called short vowels, such as /a,i,Y,e,o,u/. These features are long and short; tense and lax; Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) and Radical. Apart from features, structural analyses have been proposed to represent the differences in "length". The question is whether or not the abovementioned features can adequately indicate differences in phonological length between vowels, given the criterion in (1).