The Scots Vowel Length Rule reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-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.)

• /@/, /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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