Hm, is it saying "hamster" is /æ/ whereas "ham" is /æː/? I can't actually find a source that uses IPA yet bothers with vowel length right now ...
Even in dialects where it is not traditionally transcribed (such as American - partly because long vowels are most common in place of a disappearing /r/), usually there is in fact an audible difference when you aren't thinking about it. This is part of why computer speech always used to sound so terrible. The most blatant example is when comparing vowels before /t/ vs before /d/, which means that "matter" (short) and "madder" (long) are distinguishable even in accents where /t/ is pronounced like /d/ in this context.
Note that this is orthogonal to stress (since both syllables are stressed in this example), and also orthogonal to the badly-named "long vowel, short vowel" taught in school (which is actually for completely different vowel sounds and which omits several other vowel sounds).
Now you're making me wonder if I just don't make enough distinctions in my speech or something, at least when it comes to the short A sound.
If I speak these sentences out loud, the words sound exactly the same to me:
"That doesn't matter at all."
"He was madder than hell."
Incidentally I'd say both A's here also sound just like my A's in ham and hamster! It's a very pinched sound, almost nasally. My choir director has had to train it out of us by exaggerating it and making it sound even more ridiculous because it has no place in singing.
Sign of the quintessential American. For me, a Jamaican, "madder" and "matter" are very distinct. And I don't think I'll ever get how a "t" becomes a "d".
[t] is just the voiceless version of [d] and vice versa. The more lazily you pronounce the [t] between two vowels, the closer to [d] it becomes because it's less work to just keep the vocal chords vibrating.
I mean, everything is dialect-specific, and there is a lot of variation between dialects around /æ/ in particular (trap-bath, bad-lad, Mary-marry-merry, and the whole mess of /æ/-raising/tensing - is ban-back an example that's always split?).
But I'd still say it'd be interesting to record your voice and check the actual timings even if you can't consciously hear the length. Assuming you can actually practice running speech while thinking about it, of course.
For dialects that have this (not all English dialects do), the difference in time for the two words is precisely the difference in time for the two vowels.
Perhaps. And perhaps not. Many would elongate or voice ("voice" in the linguistic sense meaning activate the vocal cords) the m in ham - not just the lengthen the a - in a way that they wouldn't when saying hamster, in which they might pronounce the "m" as a glottal stop (the reason why hamster is often misspelled as "hampster") or as a voiceless bilabial consonant.
Regardless, it's a red herring, because vowel length can also refer to "long" vs "short" vowels as in Bake vs. Back. Thats a different, and in my view more common, meaning of vowel length
Elongating the voice is exactly what I mean by an allophonic difference.
As for 'hamster', no one (that I know of) pronounces the /m/ as a glottal stop, although people sometimes epenthesize a voiceless consonant [p] (by devoicing the end of the /m/). Where some English dialects get a glottal stop is for an intervocalic or word-final /t/ (in addition, of course, to the glottal stop in the middle of 'oh-oh' and 'uh-uh'). I've also heard American English speakers glottalize word-final /k/ and sometimes /t/, but a glottalized stop is not the same as a glottal stop.
> The most blatant example is when comparing vowels before /t/ vs before /d/, which means that "matter" (short) and "madder" (long) are distinguishable
This doesn't resonate with me - the `ma` in both those words are pronounced exactly the same and are of the same duration when speaking.
I checked a few youtube videos now before responding (some science video with 'matter' in the title and some video with 'madder' in the title) and there isn't a distinguishable difference.
Do you have a few links to videos that show a difference?
Even in dialects where it is not traditionally transcribed (such as American - partly because long vowels are most common in place of a disappearing /r/), usually there is in fact an audible difference when you aren't thinking about it. This is part of why computer speech always used to sound so terrible. The most blatant example is when comparing vowels before /t/ vs before /d/, which means that "matter" (short) and "madder" (long) are distinguishable even in accents where /t/ is pronounced like /d/ in this context.
Note that this is orthogonal to stress (since both syllables are stressed in this example), and also orthogonal to the badly-named "long vowel, short vowel" taught in school (which is actually for completely different vowel sounds and which omits several other vowel sounds).