Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>>
>> (Btw, [a] and [a:] are never contrastive, right?
>> I smell a linguistic anecdote.)
>
> Length isn't phonemic in English generally. If there were two words distinguished only by vowel length, it would turn out to be a side-effect of something else, such as r-deletion or "voicing" of the following obstruent.
I tend to believe that the length is a bigger cue in distiguishing between the following minimal pairs.
