Questions tagged [vowels]
Those speech sounds made with open, unrestricted vocal tracts, in contrast to consonants.
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Is ʕ̞ equivalent to the semivowel articulation of ɑ?
Wikipedia claims that Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996) p. 323 states that ʕ̞ is equivalent to the semivowel articulation of ɑ.
Is this true?
If so, why?
If not, what is the false premise behind this ...
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Do the qualities of a vowel determine its semivowel’s place of articulation?
[j] (the semivowel of [i]) is palatal.
[w] (the semivowel of [u]) is labial–velar.
[ɥ] (the semivowel of [y]) is labio-palatal.
Does the position of the vowel in the mouth play a part in determining ...
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Is there any sound change that can result in /ɞ/?
I am making a conlang where one of the distinctive sounds is /ɞ/. It is a rare vowel sound, and I searched Index Diachronica but couldn't find a sound change that results in it. The sound also does ...
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How to analyze nasal vowels next to nasal consonants
Let's say a language uses two vowels /A/ and /B/ which differ only by one relevant phonological feature [+/- X] such that /A/ is [- X] and /B/ is [+ X]. Now let's say there's a consonant phoneme /C/ ...
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How exactly are vowel qualities plotted on a neat quadrilateral chart?
How exactly are vowel qualities of a particular speaker, or average qualities of the speakers of an accent, plotted on a neat quadrilateral chart like these (from the Wikipedia articles for Received ...
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Why are mid-open/open vowels considered [- tense]?
I found the following chart (which was taken from Donegan (1976)) on a book and something reminded me of a simple question I always had, but I never came across a definitive answer: why are some open ...
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All vocal formants in order of frequency?
Wondering if there's any resource online that can show the sequence of vowel pitch high to low. I realise that frequencies vary depending on the speaker/accent/etc, but some kind of average/ballpark. ...
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Why are letters with a stroke not decomposed in Unicode?
There's a strait which is called Øresund in Danish and Öresund in Swedish.
Looking at Latin Capital Letter O with Stroke, it has no decomposition rules.
Looking at Latin Capital Letter O with ...
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Why does the IPA use four main vowel heights?
Because vowels exist at infinitely precise points on large acoustic and articulatory spectrums (vowel spaces), the study of phonetics uses generalized waypoints to describe them. The International ...
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How close are the Italian and the Romanian open central unrounded vowels?
The "a" sound in Italian and Romanian, is identified as the central unrounded vowel and represented as being practically identical, very close to [ä].
Although a is used in these images to ...
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The pronunciation of nasalized cardinal vowels
I hope to find the standard pronunciations of nasalized cardinal vowels and English vowels. Where can these pronunciations be found? I looked for them in many places. But they can’t be found in IPA’s ...
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Does Tibetan have nasalized consonants, or is the nasalness on the vowels?
I am working with a native Tibetan speaker to translate some words from Tibetan into English, and I noticed they were marking the pronunciation of certain consonants with a nasal marker.
They marked ...
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Where can I find all of the consonant/vowel word formation formulas for a given language? And what is the name of this?
I'm new to linguistics. I've seen that there are CVC or VVC or similar structures presented in online resources (for example Wikipedia) to denote the possible combinations of sounds.
I want to find a ...
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Might tones affect vowel quality?
Is there any language that has tone-based allophonic variation? For example, /e/ and /o/ might become [ɛ] and [ɔ] ─ literally being lowered ─ with low tone. Or since back vowels are inherently lower ...
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Are there languages with more vowels than consonants?
Almost all languages of the world have more consonants than vowels. Are there some languages of the world with more vowel phonemes than consonants?
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Why were vowels secondary citizens in many of the worlds sound-based writing systems?
Not considering logographic systems like Chinese, and outside Cuneiform (not sure if that is a logo system or something else), it appears at first glance that many of the world's writing systems ...
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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 ...
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Is there good software for measuring vowel formants?
I am trying to learn more about how people actually speak English, as opposed to the traditional phonetic transcriptions (they may have once been accurate, but come on, there's no way the vowel in &...
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How do other cultures categorize phonemes?
I don't know where it came from, but the "west" at least as I have learned, came up with the idea of "vowels" and "consonants" at some point, and we just go with that ...
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Why isn't the American r considered a vowel?
As a native American English speaker from the Northwest, whenever I isolate the r in words like "right" or "rope" it's always /ɚ/, the same as the r in words like "first" ...
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A better rule for Canadian Raising
I'm a teenager from Chicago with a pretty standard contemporary Midwestern/General American accent (not distinctly Chicago). I'm interested in the phonetic phenomenon of Canadian Raising, in which ...
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In languages that allow vowel hiatus, what rules prevent the formation of words consisting only of four or more consecutive syllabic vowels?
For those who came in late, vowel hiatus is a common term for the occurrence of consecutive vowel sounds each of which serves as the nucleus of a syllable. For example, in the word “chaotic” we see ...
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How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?
How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?
Surely, there were no pronunciation audio recordings available.
How did he know how British people had pronounced vowels centuries ago?
Have ...
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What's the geographic distribution of the father/bra split in American English?
In most American English dialects with the father/bother merger, the bother vowel (originally /ɔ/) unrounds, lowers, and merges into the father vowel (originally /ɑ/), with the end result being /ɑ/, ...
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Where is the father vowel found in English?
I was just wondering what words have the father vowel /ɑː/ in accents without the father-bother merger or the trap-bath split. My own accent (Australian English) has the trap-bath split so I can't ...
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What is the difference between two symbols: /i/ and /ɪ/?
Please tell me the difference between two Short Symbols sounds, /i/ vs. /ɪ/.
If there is no difference so why do both of them exist in Cambridge dictionary?
In its page pronunciation symbol there is ...
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Is the sound change /y/ > /i/ more common than /y/ > /u/? Are there any good examples of /y/ shifting to /u/?
Front rounded vowels are somewhat uncommon. If we focus on the high front rounded vowel /y/ and consider cases where it was lost, it seems most likely to shift to /i/ by losing its rounding or to ...
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is schwa a phoneme in English?
or is it simply an unstressed allophone of unstressed lax vowels? I'm curious because I've heard some people claim that [ə] is not a phoneme and it is just a reduced allophone of all the unstressed ...
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Why does /ɑ/ sounds so similar to [ɔ]?
For example, the /ɑ/ in the audio examples on this site and in this recording of the GenAm pronunciation of the word "cot" sounds very [ɔ]-like to my ears.
my native Georgian language has /ɑ/...
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Are syllable-timed languages with reduced vowels a thing?
the wiki article on syllable-timed languages says the following
Syllable-timed languages tend to give syllables approximately equal prominence and generally lack reduced vowels.
Are there any ...
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Is it useful to render French /i y u/ and /j ɥ w/ as allophones?
Because /i y u/ behave so differently to the other French vowels /ɛ ɑ œ ɔ/, which all have tense and nasal variants, while also being symmetrical to the semivowels /j ɥ w/, it is attractive to render ...
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I have been reconstructing Austro-Thai but the vowels are inconsistent
I have been reconstructing Austro-Thai believing it to be a rather easy undertaking and it mostly was, the consonants between the two language families line up rather well only with occasional ...
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why pronunciations of cardinal vowel No.4 [a] are so different?
The cardinal vowel No.4 [a] pronounced by Daniel Jones and some other linguistics sounds more like /æ/ as in cat.
but this cardinal vowel pronounced in the IPA website(by 4 speakers) sounds more like ...
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can a sibilant consonant like /s/ and /ʃ/ cause centralization of a following vowel?
As a native speaker of Georgian I recently noticed that in my idiolect the sibilants like /ʃ/ /s/ can make vowels /i/ and /ɑ/ sound more 'centralized', for example: /ʃiʃi/, "fear". and /...
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Does double tone mean long vowel?
After looking into the IPA for some words in tonal languages, I am starting to see things like ăn (Vietnamese), which are transcribed with two like tone marks, like ʔan˧˧. What does it mean when two ...
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What is the difference between [j w] and [i̯ u̯]?
The symbols [i̯] and [u̯] always confused me, like what makes them different from [j] and [w]?
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What would /ɯ/ most likely be replaced by? [closed]
If a language was borrowing words from another language that has /ɯ/, what would the first language possibly substitute it with?
Borrowing language phonology -
Consonants:
m n ɲ p b t d c ɟ k g ts dz ...
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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 ...
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Glottal approximate and rhotic consonants and R-colored vowels
Is there some reason why the consonant "r" can't simply be a glottal approximate and "er" be the corresponding vowel?
This would explain why different r's can be produced with the ...
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Confusion about compression vs. protrusion in rounded vowels
I'm making a song-synthesizing software, so I built some models about human speech, and I'm testing them. But it turns out there is an obstacle. I seem to have misunderstood how vowels are rounded.
I ...
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IPA confusion, difference between these vowels?
I am having trouble hearing the difference between these vowels based on this website for the IPA and would appreciate if someone could tell me the differences and how to pronounce them.
ʊ and ø
ə ...
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Wikipedia sound samples: vocal fry?
In seems to me that in Wikipedia's sound samples for the vowel sounds, there's often some vocal fry, especially in the back vowels. Vowels like ɑ
æ
ä
e and to a lesser extent:
ɤ
o
ɜ
œ. Do you concur? ...
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What are the best ways to learn to distinguish vowels?
Apologies if this question is redundant. It seems pretty basic, but I couldn't find a post that seemed relevant. If there is one, please forward it!
My question is "What are the most effective ...
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Is there an android app that adds short vowels to Persian texts?
I found an app for Arabic.
But is there an app or maybe a website for Persian too?
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Corsican vowels
In Corsican, some vowels are nasalized before a nasal consonant in the same syllable. What do these vowels have in common? Here are some examples:
'prin.tʃi.pe = prince
'fun.gu = mushroom
'ãn.ku = ...
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Pre-fortis clipping of /n/
Pre-fortis clipping is usually defined as operating on vowels. See, for example, John Wells’s blog post on the subject. But at least in my idiolect (Northern English-influenced RP), in the environment ...
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Do all semivowels have vowel equivalents, and vice versa?
I realise this is likely to be highly theoretical, as in “there could be such sounds but they aren’t phonemic in any language”. But I have a burning curiosity, and I’m hoping that there’s a concrete ...
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A language without consonants
I know that Rotokas language has fewer consonants than most (all?) languages. But I haven't been able to find a language that has no consonants (whether phonemic or phonetic). Does such a language ...
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What do these diagrams of vowels actually represent?
I've heard many times that spoken language is subjected to variations and we never make the exact same sound when we speak, even for the same word. If that's the case, how can you be so exact about ...
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Fewest number of vowels in a Germanic language?
Yiddish has an unusually small vowel inventory for a Germanic language, which are generally notorious for their large number of vowel phonemes. Probably under the influence of the surrounding gentile ...
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