Questions tagged [vowels]
Those speech sounds made with open, unrestricted vocal tracts, in contrast to consonants.
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Tone associated to segments other than vowels
Are there languages in which lexical tone can associate to semivowels or glottal stops, or does tone ALWAYS associate only to vowels when it is realized in a spoken word?
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Unmoving F1 / formant below F1?
I'm trying to understand some basics, hope this is an ok question.
Here's a recording of me producing /i/, /ɛ/, /a/: https://namakajiri.net/misc/i%c9%9ba.webm
nevermind the transition between the ...
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Why is the second formant plotted as F2-F1 in vowel space plots?
In a speech and audio processing class the lecturer pointed out that the vowel space is indicated by F1 plotted against F2-F1.
I have searched online, and most sources I've found (including this ...
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How many different vowels can be reliable annotated?
This question is similar to How many different vowels are there? but with a different twist: here I am not interested in the minimal difference between two vowels that can be heard, but in reliable ...
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Why Do Singers Prefer Back Vowel Non-Lexical Vocables?
Singers more often sing "oohs" than they do "eehs". Why is that?
It's exemplified in this article: https://qz.com/767812/millennial-whoop/ .
I've listened to a fair amount of 50's, 60's, and 70's ...
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Seeking Lao minimal pairs for /ɯ/ vs /ɤ/ vs /ɯː/ vs /ɤː/
In learning Lao one of the tricky things For a native English speaker is the two vowels that we don't have in English and sound very similar to us. This is compounded by the fact that both exist in ...
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IPA Transcription help [closed]
I'm a linguistics student and working on narrow transcriptions.
Most transcription come fairly easily to me, but I'm caught up on the vowel in the word "hard"
How should the vowel be transcribed with ...
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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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Are there any minimal pairs for German lax/tense vowels?
As we know, most German vowels have a 'tense' (or long) pronunciation and a 'lax' (or short) pronunciation.
Most of the time, which pronunciation should be used can be determined by the context that ...
user19661
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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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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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Anunasika(Chandrabindu) in Vowels (Sanskrit)
Someone said Anunasika is like trying to say something entirely in nasal voice. So let’s say I want to pronounce a vowel ‘U’kara with Chandrabindu on top of it. I know it’s should be completely a ...
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Text-to-speech for arbitrary vowels (i.e not just ipa)
So my understanding is vowel sounds can be modelled in a
2-d space together with roundedness in terms of location and openness or equivalently in terms of first and second formants.
You get pictures ...
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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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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 are the phonological rules or constraints for these pairs of words?
Mongol-Mongolia
Arab-Arabia
Babylon-Babylonian
Boston-Bostonian
comedy-comedian
colony-colonial
I know that the vowel in the second syllable is lengthened, but what are the rules or constraints for ...
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Is there a language with phonemic distinction of voicing within vowels?
Just as in the topic.
It seems unlikely to me, I could not find anything about this on wals.info but nonetheless it seems theoretically possible since articulating vowels without voicing is doable.
...
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Is [ɹ] +ATR or -ATR or is that even relevant?
Has there been any investigation into the ATR quality of the central alveolar approximant [ɹ]? It is very vowel-like and I have this theory that it could simply be the result of an advanced tongue ...
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Does California English have an additional vowel phoneme?
I've noticed that my pronunciation of the word only differs from the General American pronunciation (I'm from coastal California). This is the pronunciation of only that I assume is General American: ...
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The vowel used when pronouncing a consonant/reciting the alphabet
While this answer talks about how the names of letters are pronounced, my question is how we came up with this way of naming consonants. Is there an official term for the standard vowels used in the ...
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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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Has the letter ⟨u⟩ in english ever historically represented the phonemes /y/ or /ʏ/?
English's spelling was changed after sometime and became more like French in some areas, such as the digraph ⟨ou⟩ to represent /u/, after ⟨u⟩ came to represent /ʊ~ʌ/. The reason I ask this, however, ...
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Where do I find nikud for a word?
Where can I find some kind of database of all Hebrew words with the right nikuds? I did find a script to add nikuds to words on github, but the corpus used there is only from words from the bible, so ...
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Can the term "homorganic" be applied to vowels and glides?
As I understand it, "homorganic" means having the same place of articulation, and is said of sounds like [k] vs. [g] and [s] vs. [t]. (I couldn't find a definition from a linguistics source on the ...
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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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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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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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Formants - beyond F2
I have read that for front vowels, the cavity behind the lips (I think this must correspond to the space between the lips and the hump of the tongue) is F3, whereas for back vowels it is F2.
In that ...
user23078
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How to Transcribe R-colored Vowels (ɝ, ɚ, ɑ˞,ɔ˞) in X-SAMPA?
I'm looking at the Arpabet page on Wikipedia, and note some entries like this:
Arpabet | IPA | Word Examples
ER | ɝ | her (HH ER0); bird (B ER1 D); hurt (HH ER1 T), nurse (N ER1 S)
Now, I'm ...
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Given a vowel system, how do I find the tendencies and universals that are manifested with it?
Suppose I am given a vowel system (for example, 'i', 'upside down and then flipped e', 'a' and 'u'). How do I figure out the tendencies and universals manifested in the vowel system?
Based on my ...
user2719875
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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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Acoustic description of Polish vowels
Using formants, it is possible to produce an acoustic description of vowel quality. Basically, the first formant (F1) corresponds to vowel height, and the second formant (F2) to vowel backness, as ...
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Are there any rules governing the variation between codaic /n/ and nasal vowels in Hindustani?
Are there any rules governing when a vowel + /n/ combination in Hindustani will become a nasal vowel, or are they completely separate and unpredictable? If so, are there any minimal pairs to prove so? ...
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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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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 ...
user30668
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How much of a difference does vowel mergers make to perception of fluency?
Listening to some example French conversations between an experienced, fluent speaker and an inexperienced learner, I noticed by chance that the experienced speaker differentiates between similar ...
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Was Latin A Nasalized Language?
Thinking about it, most of the Romance languages I have heard nasalize vowels quite frequently and it seems consistent: that has me wondering, is there any evidence to show that Latin was a heavily-...
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Computational production of diphthongs
I am trying to generate vowels on MATLAB by using source-filter model. In case of monophthongs I'm using Rosenberg pulse as my source signal and then this source signal is convoluted with sounds ...
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What's up with the letter W?
English is an interesting and incestuous mangling of stuff. I sometimes think about W and it is a pretty interesting letter with much mystery and intrigue.
In French, oui begins with a W sound, yet ...
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How Hebrew Vowels Work [closed]
I am trying to find a document that clearly explains how to apply Hebrew vowels (and what all the combining characters are for Hebrew vowels), but I haven't been able to find anything after a few ...
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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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Why are languages with average vowel inventory size scattered?
Is it true that languages with average vowel inventory size (5-6 Vs) are most widely scattered? How can this be explained?
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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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Can a single vowel (or consonant) be pronounced in multiple ways (different place/manner of articulation)
I recall from my undergrad Phonetics course (many years ago), the professor was talking about the limitations of describing phonemes by place and manner of articulation.
I seem to remember an example ...
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What exactly is the Japanese 'u' sound?
I've mostly heard that its a ɯ sound. But I've also heard that its an 'endo-labial close back rounded vowel'. By 'endo-labial', I mean that its a rounded vowel that's pronounced without protruding the ...
user19661
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Tackling cross-linguistic vowel markedness system[at]ically: features or what?
I have been trying to find alternative ways of representing vowel phonemes for cross-linguistic comparisons in a unified, systematic way that would also reveal their relative (un)markedness. At the ...
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How Thai Vowels Work
I am trying to put together a worksheet to understand how the Thai script works. I am looking here and here. The wiki page seems to suggest that there are two types of symbols: combining characters ...
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Why have we come up with symbols for secondary articulation?
I've just noted that [tja] and [tʲa] sound exactly the same. It seems that [ʲ] would only be relevant in classrooms when having isolated pronunciations such as [tʲ], [kʲ], [dʲ] due to the fact we don'...
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Most Distinguishable Monophthongs/Vowels?
I was listening to the 8 Primary Cardinal Vowels and 10 Secondary Cardinal Vowels. I found the Front Vowels easier to distinguish than the Back Vowels. If I were to pick the 8 most distinguishable ...
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Are Lana's "Yup!"s triphthongs?
At some point in the Archer series, Lana starts saying very emphatic Yup!s. I was recently wondering about triphthongs and whether they occur in English, and found the Wikipedia entry had only a few ...
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