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Cardinal vowel chart showing peripheral (white) and central (blue) vowel space, based on the chart in Collins & Mees (2003:227). Phonetic reduction most often involves a mid-centralization of the vowel, that is, a reduction in the amount of movement of the tongue in pronouncing the vowel, as with the characteristic change of many unstressed vowels at the ends of English words to something ...
Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress).Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel or with certain other vowels that are described as ...
In phonology, syncope (/ ˈ s ɪ ŋ k ə p i /; from Ancient Greek: συγκοπή, romanized: sunkopḗ, lit. 'cutting up') is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.
Only a general overview of the more important changes is given here; for a full list, see the Proto-Germanic article. Unstressed word-final /a/, /e/ and /o/ were lost. Early PGmc *barta > late PGmc *bart "you carried (sg)". Word-final /m/ became /n/. Word-final /n/ was then lost after unstressed syllables with nasalization of the preceding vowel.
All unstressed vowels came to be shortened, and many texts only show a clear distinction in this context between three vowels, which can be phonemically transcribed as /ɑ e u/. [112] Even this reduced three-way contrast was lost by Middle English, and the merger of unstressed /ɑ e u/ seems in fact to have occurred before the end of the Old ...
In an unstressed position, some vowels cannot be realized and become more closed vowels: The stressed vowel /ɔ/ ò becomes the unstressed vowel [u] o . For instance (stress underlined): còde /ˈkɔde/ → codificar /kudifiˈka/. The stressed vowel /a/ a (unrounded) becomes the unstressed vowel [ɒ] a (rounded).
The term checked vowel is also useful in the description of English spelling. [8] As free written vowels a, e, i, o, u correspond to the spoken vowels / eɪ /, / iː /, / aɪ /, / oʊ /, / uː /; as checked vowels a, e, i, o, u correspond to / æ /, / ɛ /, / ɪ /, / ɒ /, / ʊ /. In spelling free and checked vowels are often called long and ...
Usually, it also follows a reduction of the unstressed vowel. Words marked with subscript A or B are exceptions to this, and thus retains a full vowel in the (relatively) unstressed syllable of AmE or BrE. A subsequent asterisk, *, means that the full vowel is usually retained; a preceding * means that the full vowel is sometimes retained.