Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
English orthography typically represents vowel sounds with the five conventional vowel letters a, e, i, o, u , as well as y , which may also be a consonant depending on context. However, outside of abbreviations, there are a handful of words in English that do not have vowels, either because the vowel sounds are not written with vowel letters ...
The IPA vowel chart has the cardinal vowels and is displayed in the form of a trapezium. By definition, no vowel sound can be plotted outside of the IPA trapezium because its four corners represent the extreme points of articulation. The vowel diagrams of most real languages are not so extreme.
Vowels with the tongue moved towards the front of the mouth (such as [ɛ], the vowel in "met") are to the left in the chart, while those in which it is moved to the back (such as [ʌ], the vowel in "but") are placed to the right in the chart. In places where vowels are paired, the right represents a rounded vowel (in which the lips are rounded ...
The following is the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system of phonetic symbols devised and maintained by the International Phonetic Association. It is not a complete list of all possible speech sounds in the world's languages, only those about which stand-alone articles exist in this encyclopedia.
The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). [2] In English, the word vowel is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them ( a , e , i , o , u , and sometimes w and y ). [3]
The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since (except when silent) they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively. The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant (as in "young") and sometimes a vowel (as in "myth").
Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols a, e, i, o, u have in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
For example, the English word fly can be considered either as an open syllable ending in a diphthong [flaɪ̯] or as a closed syllable ending in a consonant [flaj]. [ 8 ] It is unusual for a language to contrast a semivowel and a diphthong containing an equivalent vowel, [ citation needed ] but Romanian contrasts the diphthong /e̯a/ with /ja ...