Today, while practising English verbs with my wife, I remembered something I had read somewhere -- that English distinguishes word-final voiced consonants not so much by the voicing but by the length of the vowel.
And when I think about it and consider minimal pairs such as bag and back, or send and sent, the word ending in a voiced consonant does have a considerably longer vowel sound. Yet I never used to think about it and thought the only difference was in the voicing of the consonant.
Perhaps something to think about for people such as Russian and German speakers who devoice final voiced consonants -- if they lengthen the vowel properly it might make up for their difficulty in voicing the consonant.
Also, in my dialect (Los Angeles English),
May dialects also have weird rules about how a long
