Questions tagged [vowel-height]

One of the three main dimensions of vowels, reflecting the height of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth. The other dimensions are roundness and frontness/backness.

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Unexplained /ɪl/ /ɛl/ phenomenon in American English

(I hope all this background information I’m about to give is relevant.) I’m a teenager from the north side of Chicago with a mostly unplaceable General American accent. I have some general tendencies ...
Graham H.'s user avatar
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1 answer
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Number of vowel heights in European languages

Is there any language with a vowel system that cannot be analyzed as having no more than three degrees of height with the addition of some other feature (length, tenseness etc)?
Pavel Minaev's user avatar
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1 answer
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Ioticism in Greek

Are there any good theories about what motivated the pervasive ioticism that developed between ancient Greek and modern Greek? Are there any other languages that went through analogous changes? The ...
Vegawatcher's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
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How to determine one's own native vowel phone repertoire?

I'm an armchair linguist. By this I mean it's been an absorbing hobby for decades by reading books and online and playing with many languages. But I've never taken any course or other kind of formal ...
hippietrail's user avatar
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1 vote
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Fronting of a to æ in European Portuguese

In Portuguese there are two accepted reasons vowels in verbs alternate in height. The vowel harmonizing rule states that where the theme vowel (a from -ar, e from -er, and i from -ir) is deleted ...
Ryan David Ward's user avatar
1 vote
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When a vowel is nasalized does it effect on how open/close + front/back it would be?

I'm trying to generalize what environments a certain set of phonemes occur, but I'm not sure if nasalization would affect where the vowel would be on the IPA vowel chart. I think my analysis of the ...
user2696's user avatar