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There are two complementary definitions of vowel, one phonetic and the other phonological.. In the phonetic definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the English "ah" / ɑː / or "oh" / oʊ /, produced with an open vocal tract; it is median (the air escapes along the middle of the tongue), oral (at least some of the airflow must escape through the mouth), frictionless and continuant. [4]
Short vowel+consonant patterns involve the spelling of the sounds / k / as in peek, / dʒ / as in stage, and / tʃ / as in speech. These sounds each have two possible spellings at the end of a word, ck and k for / k /, dge and ge for / dʒ /, and tch and ch for / tʃ /. The spelling is determined by the type of vowel that precedes the sound.
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration.In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Czech, Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), some Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish and Estonian), Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan ...
The breve sign indicates a short vowel, as opposed to the macron ( ̄), which indicates long vowels, in academic transcription. It is often used that way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek, Tuareg and other languages. However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only the long vowels.
Tense vowels are distinguished from lax vowels with a "silent" e that is added at the end of words. Thus, a in hat is lax /æ/, but when e is added in the word hate a is tense /eɪ/. Heavy and tense-r vowels follow a similar pattern, e.g. ar in car is heavy /ɑːr/, ar followed by silent e in care is /ɛər/.
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.
Consequently, corresponding vowels may be transcribed with various symbols depending on the dialect under consideration. When considering English as a whole, lexical sets are often used, each named by a word containing the vowel or vowels in question.
There are a variety of pronunciations in Modern English and in historical forms of the language for words spelled with the letter a .Most of these go back to the low vowel (the "short A") of earlier Middle English, which later developed both long and short forms.