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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 ...
close-mid front rounded vowel, open-mid front rounded vowel or mid front rounded vowel: ø, œ or ø̞: Americanist and Uralicist notation ü: u with diaeresis: close front rounded vowel or near-close near-front rounded vowel: y or ʏ: Americanist and Uralicist notation k’ t’ etc. right single quotation mark: Korean fortis k͈ t͈ etc.
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]
In US spellings, silent letters are sometimes omitted (e.g., acknowledgment / UK acknowledgement, ax / UK axe, catalog / UK catalogue, program / UK programme outside computer contexts), but not always (e.g., dialogue is the standard spelling in the US and the UK; dialog is regarded as a US variant; the spelling axe is also often used in the US).
The letter y has double function (modifying the vowel as well as being pronounced as [j] or [i]) in the words payer, balayer, moyen, essuyer, pays, etc., but in some words it has only a single function: [j] in bayer, mayonnaise, coyote; modifying the vowel at the end of proper names like Chardonnay and Fourcroy.
Through vowel shortening in Koine Greek, long /yː/ merged with short /y/. Later, /y/ unrounded to [i], yielding the pronunciation of Modern Greek. For more information, see the articles on Ancient Greek and Koine Greek phonology. The close front rounded vowel is the vocalic equivalent of the labialized palatal approximant [ɥ].
As a result, word pairs like look and Luke, pull and pool, full and fool are homophones, and pairs like good and food and foot and boot rhyme. The history of the merger dates back to two Middle English phonemes: the long vowel /oː/ (which shoot traces back to) and the short vowel /u/ (which put traces back to).
Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, [ɑ] (the first vowel in father) is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. [i] (the vowel in "meet") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.