The Scots Vowel Length Rule reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Scots Vowel Length Rule

The Scots Vowel-Length Rule, also known as Aitken's Law after Professor A.J. Aitken who formulated it, describes how vowel length in Scots and Scottish English is conditioned by environment. (Phonetics in SAMPA.) The rule affects all vowels in Central dialects, while in periferal dialects some vowels remain unaffected.

• /@/, /I/, /V/, /E/ and /a/ are usually short.
• /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ and /2/ are usually long:
  • in stressed syllables before /v/, /D/, /z/, /Z/ and /r/.
  • before another vowel and
  • before a morpheme boundary.
• /A/, /Q/ and /O/ are usually long in most dialects.
• The diphthong /@i/ usually occurs in short environments and /aI/ in the long environments described above.

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