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Dec 6, 2023 · The primary distinction between lax and tense vowels lies in their length and the tension of the muscles used in their production. Lax vowels are shorter and produced with relatively loose muscles in the vocal apparatus. In contrast, tense vowels are longer and require relatively tense muscles for their articulation.
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.
- Catherine Anderson
- 2018
The final piece of information that we use to classify vowels is a little trickier to explain. English makes a distinction between tense and lax vowels, which is a distinction that a lot of other languages don’t have. Tense vowels are made with greater tension in the muscles of the vocal tract than lax vowels.
- Catherine Anderson
- 2018
The “tense” consonants are just unaspirated stops that are voiceless between vowels. In general, tense/lax is just a relative term to describe pairs of vowels that are similar to each other and occur in complimentary distributions. 3. Award.
In general, tense vowels are more close (and correspondingly have lower first formants) than their lax counterparts.Tense vowels are sometimes claimed to be articulated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels, but this varies, and in some languages, it is the lax vowels that are more advanced, or a single language may be inconsistent between front and back or high and mid vowels ...
Lax vowels are often represented by a single vowel letter, while tense vowels are frequently represented by vowel digraphs or combinations of letters. For example, the lax vowel /ɪ/ is typically represented by the letter "i" in words like "sit" or "bit." In contrast, the tense vowel /iː/ is represented by the vowel digraph "ee" in words like ...
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tense y ʉ u high lax ʏ ʊ tense ø ɵ o lax œ ɔ mid Œ ɒ low Front unrounded Central unrounded Back unrounded While this yields a fairly symmetrical system of symbols and articulatory classifications, there are gaps such as the lack of tense/lax distinctions among low vowels or central vowels except for the [ ʌ] ~ [ ə] distinction.