It
will be noticed that some of the vowels in figure 6.5, notably [a] and [ʌ]
in the words part and putt, are very close to each other in their phonetic
dimensions. Indeed, the words could not be distinguished from each other if it
were not for the fact that part contains a long vowel and putt a short one.
Similarly, the words cart and cut differ only in the length of their vowels.
Other word pairs in the figure
(peat/pit, port/put), although not so close in vowel
colour, nevertheless could not be distinguished if it were not for vowel
length. For this reason, length is an important feature in the classification
of vowels.
