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We classify vowels according to four pieces of information: The high/mid/low distinction has to do with how high the tongue is in the mouth. Say this list of words: beet, bit, bait, bet, bat. Now do the same thing, but leave off the “b” and the “t” and just say the vowels. You can feel that your tongue is at the front of your mouth and ...
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- Summary
- Vowel Quality
- Nasality
- Length
- Multiple Vowel Qualities in Sequence
- Putting It All Together!
Vowel phones can be categorized by the configuration of the tongue and lips during their articulation, which determines the vowel’s overall vowel quality. Vowel quality is often much more of a continuum than consonant categories like place and manner. A slight change in articulation makes little difference in what a vowel sounds like, but it can ha...
In Section 3.4, we talked about how the velum can move to make a distinction between oral and nasal stops based on whether or not air can flow into the nasal cavity. The same distinction can be found for vowels. If a vowel is articulated with a raised velum to block airflow into the nasal cavity, the vowel is called oral. If instead the velum is lo...
In addition to differences in vowel quality and nasality, vowels may also differ from each other in length, which is a way of categorizing them based on their duration. In most spoken languages where vowel length matters, there is just a two-way distinction between long vowels and short vowels, with long vowels having a longer duration than their s...
Many vowels of the world’s spoken languages have a relatively stable pronunciation from beginning to end. These kinds of stable vowel phones are called monophthongs. However, just as there are dynamic consonant phones (affricates), vowel phones may also change their articulation from beginning to end. Most of these are diphthongs, which begin with ...
There is not as much consistency in the order of descriptions for vowels as for consonants. Perhaps the most common order is height – backness – rounding, but rounding is sometimes given first instead, and though height is usually given immediately before backness, these can also be switched. Thus, the vowel in the English word betmight be describe...
The LAX VOWELS I, U, and A are very short in duration; they can even be silent. Lax vowels also sound quite different when they are in combination with W or U. (For example, they can be tense instead of lax.) The pronunciation of lax U, I and A is described below.
This is shown in the table below. There are a number of differences between these two classes of vowels. First, lax vowels tend to be centralized, i.e. pronounced closer to /ə/ than tense vowels. Second, lax vowels tend to be monophthongal, while tense vowels tend to be diphthongal. That is, even for GA /iː, uː, eɪ, oʊ/, the tongue tends ...
The lax vowels are closer to the middle of the quadrant; the tongue is not pushing out toward the extreme edges of the mouth, so in a sense, it is more relaxed. Another difference between tense and lax vowels in in the positions in which they can be used in words. Tense vowels can occur both in closed syllables (those that end in a
In English phonology, there are twenty main orthographic vowels of stressed syllables. Some linguists have grouped these into four main categories: ‘Lax’, ‘Tense’, ‘Heavy’ and Tense-R’. Tense and lax vowels. Tense vowels are distinguished from lax vowels by adding a silent ‘e’ at the end of the word. So, the letter ‘a’ in ...
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Do all words have tense and lax vowels?
What words end in lax vowels?
Which French words vary between tense and lax vowels?
Can tense and lax vowels appear in the same environment?
Are high vowels tense or lax?
How do lax vowels sound?
All the words in the left-hand column have tense vowels, and the right-hand words have lax vowels. Look at this pair of words, lunettes (glasses) and lune (moon). If we just look at the surrounding consonants, it looks like both the tense and lax vowels can appear in the same environment — they both have an [l] before them and an [n] afterwards.
