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Is the concept in Hebrew, of long vowels and short vowels , a purely grammatical thing, or a a statement about how the vowel is sounded(in length or anything else?), or both(how it's sounded plus grammatical)?
I'm not talking about the Hataph vowels 'cos I guess those would be shorter. The word Hataph is implying, hurried.
And does it only apply to Sephardi pronunciation,or does it also apply to Modern Israeli pronunciation? Does it have any application to Ashkenazi pronunciation?
For most speakers of Modern Hebrew, there is no phonemic vowel length, that is, neither between full vowels (i.e. ṣērê), short vowels (sĕgōl) or reduced vowels (ḥāṭēp sĕgŏl). All are pronounced /e/, but may (as the rest of the simple vowels) be shortened to [ə] when far from lexical stress.
But when speaking of Hebrew, there are many variants and many historical stages of language to consider.
In the early stages of Biblical Hebrew, there was indeed a phonemic distinction of length, so that short and long vowels were distinguished in speech by their duration, but there was a tendency for this distinction of length to collapse into a distinction of quality.
Thus by the time of Tiberian Hebrew (the form typically found in printed Hebrew Bibles), the difference between so-called "short" and "long" vowels had primarily become one of quality, i.e. ṣērê was /e/, but sĕgōl was /ɛ/. There may have been a secondary phenomenon of positional length, where a vowel would have been pronounced long when stressed or in an open syllable, and shorter when unstressed or in a closed syllable. At the same time, other traditions (e.g. those that served as bases for the Sephardic pronunciation) had preserved an older distinction of phonemic vowel length.
PS: In Modern Hebrew too, true long vowels sometimes arise from the merger of two vowels when a glottal stop is elided, so that a word such as תַּעֲבֹד, which is phonemically /taʔaˈvod/, is pronounced with a long vowel: [taːˈvod].
There is a phonetic (pronounced) difference between long and short vowels in Hebrew, it is not just a grammatical abstraction. There are indeed three degrees of length: reduced, "normal", and long, reduced (hataph) being a feature of Biblical Hebrew. However, there is a chicken-egg question, whether vowel length is predictable based on stress or is stress predictable based (in part) on vowel length. The main controversy, as I understand it, is whether vowel length is "important" in the same way that the difference between [i] and [a] is important.
This work provides an analysis of Biblical Hebrew phonology, which lays out the complex relationship between stress and vowel length in Biblical Hebrew. This work argues that vowel length is abstractly relevant to Modern Hebrew without positing that it is a surface-obvious feature of pronunciation.
I don't have a full answer on this.
They are certainly taken as a grammatical concept. In that they influence how the shva is sounded. Whether the shva is vocal or not.There is a slight difference in the rules on shva being vocal or not, between sephardi and ashkenazi, but both use the concept of long/short vowels as a grammatical point.e.g. https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/92599/what-are-the-rules-for-shva-na
There is a book "how the hebrew language grew" that around p 334 writes on this and states its opinions kind of frivously, e.g. defining it different ways without saying so explicitly, making statements he makes conflict a bit.
A thing the book says that is clear is it indicates that some people must have thought that it was longer or shorter in quantity as on p334 it quotes samuel david luzatto saying all the sephardim he hears don't distinguish kamatz gadol and patach. In the book "How The Hebrew Language Grew" p334 it says "Samuel David Luzatto, one of the most famous Hebrew Scholars of the 19th century, an Italian, wrote very simply, "All my life I grew up among Sephardic Jews, many of them distinguished scholars and rabbis. I have never heard once anyone distinguish between the ah sound of a kamatz gadol and a patah"
Another meaning of long/short is in pronunciation, like the difference between took and boot(for 'u'). bit and been(for i). Bet and bait(For 'e'). Clock(british accent not us accent), and Cloak(for 'o'). And that seems to be more to do with whether a syllable is open or closed.
And maybe some might use the term long/short to mean the vowel written in full form e.g. the 'i' vowel (chirik vowel) written with a yud following it. Vs the vowel written in its short form,so the 'i' vowel without a yud following it.
The ambiguity of the terms long/short make the terms not very good...but it's important to know the range of meanings, to try to help determine which they might mean if they sadly use the terms.
Another meaning of the concept of short vowels is how like in English, when the accent moves forward from a syllable, the vowel of the syllable lessens. Cigar becomes Cigarette. The ah of cigar equivalent to the kamatz gadol ah , becomes uh like a Hebrew shva(ashkenazim and sephardim do a shva like uh. Modern hebrew might do it like ih). .(the book "how the hebrew lanuage grew" uses that example on p337. Gadol become Gedolah or Gedolim . Maivin becomes Muhvina.
