Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The most distinctive letter in the Estonian alphabet, however, is the Õ (O with tilde), which was added to the alphabet in the 19th century by Otto Wilhelm Masing and stands for the vowel .
In Estonian, Õ is the 27th letter of the alphabet (between W and Ä), and it represents a vowel characteristic of Estonian, the unrounded back vowel /ɤ/, which may be close-mid back, close back, or close-mid central. [1]
Estonian vowel chart, from Asu & Teras (2009:368). For some speakers, /ɤ/ can be more back (closer to /o/), or more back and higher (closer to /u/). There are 9 vowels and 36 diphthongs, 28 of which are native to Estonian. [1] All nine vowels can appear as the first component of a diphthong, but only /ɑ, e, i, o, u/ occur as the second component.
Estonian employs the Latin script as the basis for its alphabet. The script adds the letters ä, ö, ü, and õ, plus the later additions š and ž. The letters c, q, w, x and y are limited to proper names of foreign origin, and f, z, š, and ž appear in loanwords and foreign names only.
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Estonian pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
In Estonian õ, ä, ö and ü are considered separate letters and collate after w. Letters š, z and ž appear in loanwords and foreign proper names only and follow the letter s in the Estonian alphabet, which otherwise does not differ from the basic Latin alphabet.
It is the 20th letter of the Estonian alphabet, where it is used in loan words. It is the 22nd letter of the Karelian and Veps alphabets. It is the 29th letter of the Northern Sami alphabet, where it represents . It is regarded as a variant of Z in Finnish.
Pages for logged out editors learn more. Contributions; Talk; Estonian alphabet