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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.
But for [i], the muscles are more tense than for [ɪ]. The same is true for the vowels in late and let, [e] and [ɛ]. And also for the vowels in food and foot, [u] and [ʊ] It can be hard to feel the physical difference between tense and lax vowels, but the distinction is actually an important one in the mental grammar of English.
- Catherine Anderson
- 2018
Mar 17, 2024 · 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.
An example in Vietnamese is the letters ă and â representing lax vowels, and the letters a and ơ representing the corresponding tense vowels. Some languages like Spanish are often considered as having only tense vowels, but since the quality of tenseness is not a phonemic feature in this language, it cannot be applied to describe its vowels in any meaningful way.
Natural classes of sounds tend to behave similarly because they have features in common. We can distinguish obstruents, sonorants, glides, and vowels using the major class features, and distinguish in more detail within these major classes using features for place and manner of articulation. 4.4 Natural Classes.
- Catherine Anderson
- 2018
Mar 18, 2024 · T he tense vowels of English also tend to inherently be a bit longer than their lax counterparts. For example, the tense vowel in the English word beat is longer than the lax vowel in bit. Consonants may also differ from each other in length. Long consonants are often called geminates, while short consonants are called singletons.
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Contrasts between two vowels on the basis of tenseness, and even phonemic contrasts, are common in many languages, including English.For example, in most English dialects, beet and bit are contrasted by the vowel sound being tense in the first word but not the second; i.e., / iː / (as in beet) is the tense counterpart to the lax / ɪ / (as in bit); the same is true of / uː / (as in kook ...