Talk:Vowel/Archive 1

Archive 1

formants

Great page!

but - needs some information on the frequency structure of vowels, formant frequencies etc. Emmjade 13:03 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I second the motion. Info about vowel formants needed. - Ish ishwar 01:52, 2005 Jan 28 (UTC)

latin

Latin had five vowels? Sorry, but no. Even if you ignore the length distinction (or the tense/lax distinction, however you want to interpret it), Latin still had a sixth cardinal vowel: y. -Branddobbe 23:41, Apr 11, 2004 (UTC)

What was the value of y in Latin? Nohat 22:12, 2004 May 8 (UTC)

For those who knew Greek, probably [y] – the letter only occurs in recent Greek loans. For those who didn't, it was [i], as confirmed by misspellings in graffiti.

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 19:18 CEST | 2006/4/6

triphthong examples

the vowel sound in fire is a triphthong Is there a better example of a triphthong? Some of us do pronounce our rs, which I think would make the last sound a sonorant but not a vowel. Markalexander100 03:07, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

post-vocalic R's in rhotic dialects are rhotacized vowels. It's a triphthong in British and American English, although not in some dialects of southern american. Nohat 14:34, 2004 May 13 (UTC)

Ah, fair enough. Markalexander100 01:44, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

How many syllables do you think fire has - I think I have two in my (British) accent - and that it ends in schwa. Secretlondon 07:01, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

1 or 2 syllables (depending on your method for counting them), but 3 vowel sounds. Nohat 21:51, 2004 May 31 (UTC)

Triphthong says a triphthong is monosyllabic. Somewhere, we must be over-generalising. Markalexander100 00:32, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The problem is that in certain phonological analyses of English, words like "fire" and "jail" constitute just a single so-called super-heavy syllable, which many people perceive as being two syllables when the pronounce the word in isolation or citation form. It's complicated, because in normal speech those words function like other monosyllabic words. From a phonetic point of view, diphthongs and triphthongs are just connected series of vowels; the status of the number of syllables doesn't play into the phonetic definition of diphthongs and triphthongs. However, when you start getting into phonology, the distinction between series of vowels in separate syllables and monosyllabic diphthongs and triphthongs becomes important. From a purely phonetic point of view, there is no distinction, and languages that do distinguish them use cues like hiatus and lengthening to distinguish between diphthongs and series of vowels. Nohat 23:10, 2004 Jun 1 (UTC)

Since the above have problems with English examples, why not choose another language for example? I have put some info about vowels in Vietnamese language. - Ish ishwar 01:54, 2005 Jan 28 (UTC)

Or the Dutch language? - Karl Palmen 2005 Jan 28 09:00 (UTC)

Request for references

Hi, I am working to encourage implementation of the goals of the Wikipedia:Verifiability policy. Part of that is to make sure articles cite their sources. This is particularly important for featured articles, since they are a prominent part of Wikipedia. The Fact and Reference Check Project has more information. Thank you, and please leave me a message when you have added a few references to the article. - Taxman 20:00, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

Pending nomination for defeaturing

This article does not meet featured article criteria on the following counts:

• There is an unattributed statement (Some linguists claim that it is possible to posit only one vowel in some Abkhaz dialects....)Do those linguists have names?
  
• There are no references. Make wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world and add references. There is also no policy that says the reference criteria is not retroactive. It has been more than a year since that requirement was added, and more than a month since Taxman made his request.
• The section on vowels is inadequate: How about Armenian, Burmese, or Greek; for Japanese there are too few characters)? Why is there Russian alphabet instead of the Cyrillic?

Thanks. Please leave me a message when these points are addressed.

If not all of these points are addressed, I, Miss Madeline, will nominate this article at WP:FARC on June 15, 2005. Miss Madeline | Talk to Madeline 21:34, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

re alphabets: why do alphabets need to be discussed in an article on vowels? are all languages with writing systems going to have their characters listed here? would this help us understand what vowels are anyway? i would think that this section could simply be removed. thoughts on this? peace – ishwar  (speak) 05:04, 2005 Jun 19 (UTC)

Well an article on vowels should discuss how they are used in various languages, and how their usage varies across languages. - Taxman ^Talk 07:15, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)

yes, i think so, too. but then, the graphic representation of vowels through writing systems is irrelevant to a discuss of vowels — it is rather a relevant issue to orthography. – ishwar  (speak) 2005 June 29 21:20 (UTC)

Removed notice as issues were mostly addressed Miss Madeline | Talk to Madeline 29 June 2005 19:16 (UTC)

Where's this?

I found a language called Tydash with a vowel pronunciation table. The consonant table, though confusing, can probably be managed. But I can't find what high/mid/low means. Just what're these pertaining to?

VOWELS	Front	Central	Back
High	y		u
Mid	ä	i	a
Low	ö	e	o

(That's likely copyrighted, though I can't find a copyright notice. I found it here.)

high/mid/low refers to tongue position. A lower tongue results in a larger mouth cavity and hence a lower frequency sound. –Shoaler (talk) 23:37, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Now I gotta figure out how to actually pronounce these :-)

Aha! The word shähi is pronounced somewhat like "schyehuh"--the sch sounding rather exactly like a consonantal hiss.

Lowering the tongue does not lower the fundamental frequency (since the overall vocal tract length essentially remains the same for all vowels). Lowering the tongue raises the frequencies of the first formant. The first formant frequency is basically what speakers use to distinguish low, mid, & high vowels. peace – ishwar  (speak) 21:55, 2005 August 7 (UTC)

Uhh... okay. Tell me how to pronounce shahi here then :-) --67.172.99.160 01:36, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Shahi would be pronounced [ɕohə]. Or perhaps [ʃohə] was intended. Either way the closest thing in English would be "show-huh". Shähi would be [ɕehə] "shay-huh". (In case anyone else out there is curious, this is an invented language.) kwami 18:53, 2005 September 9 (UTC)

english example change

changed example of english 'prism' to 'table'... but noted in my edit comment to refer to Consonant cluster... that's wrong... see Consonant and Talk:Consonant

Exit 18:17, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Accessibility

The section on articulation was wonderful...I've been reading on this stuff off and on for a long time, but this was the first time vowel sounds have made sense.

On the other hand, could the section on prosody at least explain what prosody is? And I don't get this sentence:

The Mixe language has a three-way contrast among short, half-long, and long vowels, and this has been reported from a few other languages, in not all of which is the distinction phonemic.

What does it mean about not always phonemic...like what kind of distinction would it be? NickelShoe 21:07, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Phonetic. I think it's probably referring to various Finnic languages which apparently have three lengths but the overlong length is conditioned by some other feature. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 23:29, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

That's not really accurate. "Suprasegmental" is better. Finnic languages indisputably distinguish three vowel lenghts phonetically, where one vowel length is an allophonic. Estonian, however, has undergone extensive syncopy, and the causes of allophony have been lost, leaving the tonal and length variations in a phonemic status. --Vuo 00:43, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I still don't understand. I appreciate you trying, but even when I understand the words, it's hard to tie it all together when I'm fuzzy on distinctions between "phonetic" and "phonemic" and whatnot. I realize the technical terms exist for a reason, but they tend to suck for explaining things to people who aren't already up on the jargon. So I go read the article on one term, only to have to look up another in order to understand it, and so on. Basically I have to read every article on phonetics before I can understand any of them in full. Bleh. NickelShoe 05:49, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Sorry. Perhaps I will explain the thing you've quoted and we can work some other stuff out too. My knowledge on prosody isn't that great though (I'm only an amateur linguist and know only what I've picked up here and there) so someone else will need to help with that. Perhaps you can then help merging this information into appropriate parts of the arcticle to help someone without the jargon. Does anyone know if there's some sort of accessiblity guidelines/project? Not down to a level of Basic English, but something an outsider could understand.

So about what you've quoted. A phonetic distinction is one that is physically there and that an objective observer (e.g. someone looking at a graph of the speech) can see/hear. So for instance, when I say the word "seat", the vowel takes less time to say than when I say "seed"; likewise, when I say "cut" it takes less time than when I say "card" (in both cases, the biggest differences are length and the final consonant). A phonemic distinction is one that is relevant to the members of the speech community; the distinction is one that can't be derived from context. Every vowel in those four words takes a different length of time to say (in the order cut-seat-seed-card), but I ignore the difference between "seat" and "sead", and hear them both as the same vowel. On the other hand, I pay attention to the difference between "cut" and "card". If you asked me to put the vowels into different categories based on length, it would be (cut) vs (card, seat, sead). So for me, even though there's four different lengths (plus more...), there's only two different categories in my mind.

In Mixe tho, there's *three* different categories that are relevant. They probably have many more lengths as well...

I may still be too technical, or too patronising, or a mixture of both, and I apologise. I'm not the best at explaining things...

BTW: I speak Australian English. Other dialects have different rules about vowel length and vowel qualities and which R's they pronounce, so you might find that the vowel in 'seat' is shorter than the vowel in 'cut' (if you can hear the difference).

—Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 06:58, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I get it now, and it wasn't patronizing. What confused me was the idea of "contrasting" without the difference being phonemic. NickelShoe 11:21, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Quadriphthongs?

Just a short question. I've been reading about the Aromanian language in some text on phonetics and orthography written by a native speaker, and I found out that these guys have a quadriphthong in the word "ceai" (tea) which is pronounced /ʧěaǐǔ/. The reverse circumflex accented symbols represent semivowels. This whole word is pronounced in a single syllable just like the corresponding Romanian word, spelled identically, but pronounced /ʧěaǐ/, without the final rounding. The succession of two semivowels is not unique in itself, Romanian has a couple of those, but I think four vocalic sounds in a syllable is. Does anyone know about quadriphthongs in other languages? Thanks. --AdiJapan 07:08, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

If it's indeed a native Romanian speaker making the transcription, then that transcription is contaminated by Romanian orthography. In Romanian, the palatal glide is written just 'i'. The real pronunciation must be /ʧěajǔ/. Similar words exist in other languages, and they always contain a palatal or velar glide. --Vuo 12:19, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for replying, Vuo. The text I'm talking about was written by a native Aromanian speaker, in Aromanian. He doesn't include an IPA transcription (because he addresses native Aromanians whom he is teaching how to write), but he describes the word pronunciation in sufficiently good detail for me to infer the pronunciation. In this particular case, he says that in the word "ceai" only "a" is a vowel, with all others being semivowels, including the short final sound "u" that is not written, and that everything is pronounced in one syllable. Clear enough. I myself chose the symbol /ǐ/ for the semivowel /j/ just for the sake of uniformity: /ě/ /ǐ/ /ǒ/ /ǔ/ are in my notation the four semivowels of Romanian, of which /ǐ/ and /ǔ/ are generally written /j/ and /w/. Your transcription is then equivalent to mine.

Now, if you say this glide through four vowels also appears in some other languages, I'd be very interested to know some examples. They would further legitimate the name of "quadriphthong" that I think is appropriate. The only other examples I have are some Romanian words which, in a regional and rather archaic pronunciation, end in /ěaǐǔ/ (or /ěajw/ if you prefer). These include the noun "ceai" and a series of verbs in the indicative imperfect tense 2nd pers. sg., such as "goleai" /go'lěaǐǔ/ (you were emptying). --AdiJapan 05:07, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Allow me to reiterate: I do not think quadriphthongs exist, since they require an approximant glide. Off the top of my head, I can think of Finnish auoin "I was opening (several things)" and lauoin "I shot (many times)". It is well established that although they feature four consecutive orthographic vowels, they feature an approximant glide: [auɥoin], [lauɥoin]. Of course, if you include the voiceless vowel 'h', it's not difficult to cite huouit "you emanated" and so on, since the articulation of 'h' is identical to the following vowel, except for its lack of voicing. [u̥uoɥui] would be the (unusual) transcription for this. --Vuo 23:06, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Sorry to step in on a note of pure pedantry, but the word you're looking for is tetraphthong. 144.178.184.86 22:24, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Degrees of contrast

Ish Ishwar has recently added the statement The highest number of constrastive degrees of backness is 3 to the backness section of this article. I've heard similar statements before, but I find them slightly confusing. Doesn't American English contrast four levels of backness: front /i/, near-front /ɪ/, near-back /ʊ/ and back /u/ (some of which may or may not come with extra added length)? If near-front doesn't count as a level of backness, why is it included in the list of degrees of backness? —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 06:10, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

hi. There are more than 3 phonetic differences, but these are not contrastive. The distinction in English is due also to vowel length and tongue height. To be clearly contrastive, it should be only the horizontal parameter that creates the primary difference. perhaps this is not clear? – ishwar  (speak) 06:33, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps you could add an example, but good luck finding one where rounding isn't distinctive!

Actually, SOWL has two exaples. Nimboran [ki] 'woman', [kɨ] 'shit', [kɯ] 'day'. (You'd better get your vowels right in that language!)

Nweh (Ngwe) has a phonetic, though evidently non-phonemic distinction in [mbe] 'knife', [ntsə] 'water', [mbɤ] 'ivory'. kwami 06:51, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! I think that might be usefully added. What languages have three solely contrastive backnesses? I could think of Swedish's /uː/, /ʉː/, /yː/ triplet, except that apparently (so says the article) /ʉː/ and /yː/ are distinguished by endo/exolabial rounding (or whatever). I'm not an expert on language phonetics tho, I just like having records backed up. 'No language has more than three vowels distinguished solely by backness. Foolang is one which makes this many contrasts', or something. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 07:00, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

The Scandivanian languages aren't a bad example, but are debatable. Ngwe is one of the Grassfields languages of Cameroon, closely related to Bantu, that is famous for having a large number of vowel distinctions, though evidently they aren't all phonemic (some only occur after some consonants, some after others). Nimboran is a language of New Guinea in the small Nimboran family.

It is questionable whether three degrees of backness can be justified phonologically (Nimboran may have been misanalysed after all), but there are enough languages with front, central, and back vowel that differ only by roundness, where roundness isn't otherwise distinctive, that it isn't hard to swallow the idea of phonemic central vowels. kwami 07:31, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your help; I might improve the article shortly. To my (amateurish) mind, that seems like it should be harder to swallow the idea—front rounded and back unrounded vowels are usually somewhat centralised anyway, so really it's just a matter of degrees. Still, I defer to the more-studied members amongst us. (Also, the fact that in at least some dialects of English, /ɜː/ can be either rounded or not depending on speaker age/origin and perhaps context indicates that it could be a long mid central vowel of unspecified rounding... hm...) —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 08:29, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

here's a link to a working paper Central vs. Back Vowels:

http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/linguistics/wp/2000Parker.PDF.

it's kinda theoretical, but you can look through & see which languages have the contrast. peace – ishwar  (speak) 16:58, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Question about first paragraph

I'm a bit confused by the phrase "syllabic unit" in the first paragraph. What's a syllabic unit? Could a link be added? Is this the same as a syllable nucleus?

It means only that vowels are units which are inherently syllabic. If you have a vowel, you have a syllable. That isn't the case with consonants. kwami 00:29, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Written Vowels in English

Re this sentence: In the Latin alphabet, the vowel letters are usually A, E, I, O, U, and in some languages Y, as in English and W, as in Welsh.

I certainly agree with Y, and with W in Welsh. But W can also be a vowel in English too, albeit via Welsh. Take cwm. This is a Welsh word that has been accepted in English dictionaries and in the Scrabble community as a valid word that now forms part of the English language. Cwm often makes it onto lists and sites that claim it's an English word containing no vowels. But that's not possible. If W was a vowel when it was solely a Welsh word, and the spelling has not been changed upon its adoption into English, and the W is still performing exactly the same role as it did when it was solely a Welsh word, then how can W possibly have ceased to be a vowel? Answer: it hasn't. Cwm is either an English word containing the vowel W, or it isn't an English word at all (and all the dictionaries and Scrabble enthusiasts are going to have be told the bad news). The claim that it's an English word without any vowels is just not on. JackofOz 05:55, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes, of course it's a vowel. It's also an unassimilated loan, and I've always seen the word spelled coomb etc. Where I live, there are freeway signs with the letter Ñ. Does that make Ñ a consonant in English? Or take the words façade and rôle - Do they mean that Ç is an English consonant, and Ô an English vowel? There are words without vowels, of course ("word" itself is one, in rhotic accents), but the cwm thing is digging at the very margins of the language. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but why stop at w? (Before you argue that Ñ and Ç have diacritics while W is a separate letter, remember that all three are historically digraphs: NN, CZ, VV.) kwami 07:37, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

The symbol in the IPA that represents this sound is u (or u if you're anywhere near Australia). --Ayelis 19:58, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Contrasting heights

Quote:

It may be that some varieties of German have five contrasting heights. The Bavarian dialect of Amstetten [Württemberg, not Lower Austria...] has thirteen long vowels, reported to be distinguished as four heights (close, close-mid, mid, and near-open) among the front unrounded, front rounded, and back rounded vowels, plus an open central vowel: /i e ε̝ æ̝/, /y ø œ̝ ɶ̝/, /u o ɔ̝ ɒ̝/, /a/. Otherwise, the usual limit on the number of vowel heights is four.

Why use an obscure dialect? Standard German has /iː ɪ eː ɛ/ (plus /æː/ in some regions), /yː ʏ øː œ/, /uː ʊ oː ɔ/, plus [ɐ] (an allophone of /ʀ/) and /a aː/ (one of the latter is central rather than front in some regions). That makes six vowel heights. If we allow vowels that only occur in diphthongs English, too, distinguishes six heights.

Now, I could have misunderstood the criteria. Do /ɪ ʏ ʊ/ not count because they are only near-front and near-back (so that height is not phonemic alone)? But if so, why does the reportedly central /a/ of that dialect count? Or do half of my examples not count because some have inherent shortness (so that, again, height isn't phonemic alone)? Is length really not distinctive at all in that dialect? :-S

(Oh, and does that dialect lack [ɐ]? As a Bavarian dialect it's not supposed to…!)

What have I missed?

David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 21:48 CEST | 2006/4/6

In that dialect of Bavarian, all the contrasting vowels are long. In Standard German, you're also contrasting length, or tense-lax if you prefer, so it isn't simply a matter of height. The question is, holding all other parameters constant, how many height contrasts are possible? kwami 01:59, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

One of the best articles, but practically useless?

So much information about vowels... So little information on how to pronounce them. Understanding that English has various dialects and pronunciations (RP, GA, AuE, NZE, and CaE among others), I feel that this SPECIFIC article needs a pronunciation guide in addition to the sections it already has. I call for a "pronunciation disambiguation" on the main Vowel page; a section that explains pronunciation all in one place, to keep people from having to click on each little vowel to find out how they pronounce all the symbols of the IPA. And since Wikipedia's slogan is "Be Bold in updating pages", I shall take it upon myself to add such a section, such an 'all in one place' disambiguation. I call for your support; Do not remove this section if it doesn't meet your standards, but be bold in updating and improving the section: Make it work. --Ayelis 21:19, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Would it be possible to provide a more objective guide to pronunciation? I'm not familiar enough with the accents above to determine from the examples how each sound is pronounced, and I'm not familiar enough with the chart to make more than a rough guess as to how the accent goes. Maybe an explanation of the vowel sounds using the descriptions mentioned in the rest of the article, open, rounded, etc., would help in understanding these pronunciations. Amanita 14:53, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Weasel Words

"... most linguists do not believe"

Totally weasel. Cite sources, or delete the phrase. --Einstein9073 04:23, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I didn't write this phrase, but I did come up with several citations that approximate the belief that such analyses are not generally accepted. One such analysis of Chinese (Pulleyblank, E.G. (1984) "Vowelless Chinese? An application of the three-tiered theory of syllable structure." In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (v2: pp. 568-619)) is referred to in both Duanmu's The Phonology of Standard Chinese and http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~pkpm2/yue.pdf as being an "extreme" theory. My intro linguistics book, Essential Introductory Linguistics by Grover Hudson, says that "All languages have consonants and vowels" is an absolute non-implicational universal, as does Comrie's Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, which suggests that indeed most linguists would quarrel with no-vowel language analyses. The first four citations on http://books.google.com/books?q=do+all+languages+have+vowels&hl=en&hs=HRm&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=N&tab=wp all say the same.

I don't have any experience adding citations to an article (I mostly do small grammar and content edits) but I'm happy to see any or all of these added as citations to support the statement. --armchairlinguist 11:27, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Reader Question

Listening to the sound samples, IPA vowel 321 (X-SAMPA: U) sounds lower than IPA vowel 323 (X-SAMPA: 8). Has there been a mix-up between those two sound samples? If there is no mix-up, then the Swedish sound sample 'ort' as an example in which the vowel U (X-SAMPA) occurs makes little sense. Of course, the Swedish U is not pronounced exactly like the English U, but to my ear the sound sample of U does not sound like the vowel in 'bush' or 'bull' either. If the sound sample of the vowel U is pronounced without roundedness, then that might explain the sound of it.

The sound sample for the Swedish word 'full' as an example in which the vowel 8 (X-SAMPA) occurs is not very convincing either, although this may be due to the fact that the vowel in Sw. 'full' is "mid central" rather than "close-mid central".

The above question was asked on the talk page 21:11, 22 June 2006 by 83.227.57.90 and moved here User:Angr 13:59, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Semivowel in Welsh

The syllable nucleus may also be a semivowel, like W in Welsh.

What does this mean? In English, the semivowel in "Welsh" is not the syllable necleus; it's the syllable onset. Can /w/ be a syllable nucleus in the Welsh language? --Kjoonlee 07:39, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I think what the sentence is attempting to say is that the letter w represents a vowel sound (/u/ or /ʊ/) in Welsh. I'll try to re-phrase it. User:Angr 11:54, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Issues with the 'written vowels' section...

The second paragraph states:

In the case of English, the five primary vowel letters can represent both long and short vowel sounds (some of the long vowel sounds in English are actually diphthongs). Furthermore, in English some vowel sounds are represented by combinations of vowel letters, such as the ea in beat or by a vowel letter and an approximant letter, as the ow in how, or the er in her. (emphasis mine)

Two problems here, the first being that there is no distinction in English between long and short vowels. What were in the traditional grammar taught as long and short vowels are in reality entirely different vowels. I would change it, but I'm not sure how to word it.

Issue number two is that the 'er' in "her" is neither a vowel nor an approximant in my English. It's a syllabic r. Obviously, this is not true for the entire English speaking population and for them, there is a vowel in there, but perhaps we could choose an example that is slightly less ambiguous? --Stella luna 04:14, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps instead of trying to make sense of the english vowel system and explain it, just say what it actually is. A complete mess. Or maybe we could say:

The five primary vowel sounds can represent what are traditionally considered 'long' and 'short' vowel sounds. Unlike some languages, the 'long' and 'short' vowels in English differ in quality (many are completely different vowels, and some long vowels are actually diphthongs) and not their actual length of pronunciation. These vowels may also represent completely different vowel sounds different from their 'long' or 'short' pronunciations. For example, the a in any and father both differ from both the 'long' and 'short' pronunciations of the letter a. Furthermore, these five primary vowel sounds can form combinations, which can also include certain consonants, which are pronounced in quite an irregular fashion. Take, for instance, the differences between the ou in pour and our and the ough in tough and though.

How does that sound? Maybe a bit choppy? Also, the 'er' in 'her' is not a syllabic 'r', syllabic r's, as far as I know, are found in Czech or Slovak (may be wrong there) and not in English, but the 'er' in 'her', according to the Standard American dialect, is a rhotacized open-mid central unrounded vowel. But considering how I got rid of the example of 'her' in my paragraph rewrite, and replaced it with 'ough', that shouldn't be a problem. --Redtitan 18:17, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the r you are thinking of (which is indeed found in Czech) is a 'raised alveolar non-sonorant vibrant' (taken directly from the Czech language page). In English, a syllabic r is simply where there is no other vowel and the r functions as the nucleus of the syllable. A professor of mine last year (who, incidentally, was an American from Minnesota) had the policy that rhoticized schwa was, for our purposes, interchangeable with syllabic r. Maybe there's a difference, I'm not sure. But thanks for all the input!--Stella luna 18:55, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

There is a phonetic difference between r in the onset of a syllable (like red and bread) and r in the rhyme of a syllable, but none really between the "syllabic r" of bird and the coda r of car or more. For this reason it's occasionally suggested that it would be more accurate to transcribe car and more narrowly as [kʰɑɚ̯] and [mɔɚ̯] instead of [kʰɑɹ] and [mɔɹ], and use the symbol [ɹ] only for the onset consonant, but in practice this is hardly ever done. User:Angr 07:15, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

Integration of articulation articles

The articles manner of articulation and place of articulation, and at least part of vowel and consonant, seemed intended to form a cluster under articulatory phonetics. So I've altered the linkage, changing the vowel up link from Phonetics to Articulatory phonetics (which in retrospect seems... in need of review), and adding a similar uplink to consonant, which didn't have one. And added uplinks to the articulation pages, which seems straightforward. I did a little bit of cleanup of the articulatory phonetics stub, but it still needs much work. Perhaps the vowel and consonant up links should be to phonetics, with a link to articulatory phonetics in their articulation sections? 66.30.119.55 06:07, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I've reverted the vowel up link to phonetics and made "articulatory feature" at the top of the Articulation section into a new link to articulatory phonetics. However, I've just discovered distinctive feature. Perhaps manner of articulation and place of articulation belong under it instead of articulatory phonetics? Consonant already has a link to it, and the new vowel "articulatory feature" link could nicely be repointed. Then one would only need to improve linkage between the articulation articles and distinctive feature (and between it and articulatory phonetics). 66.30.119.55 06:32, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Reference for languages with more vowels than consonants

"and in languages whose inventories of vowels are larger than their inventories of consonants."

Aside from the languages listed under "having very few consonants", are there any such languages?

--Armchairlinguist 23:57, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Aside from those languages, I don't know. But it's certainly true of Hawaiian, one of the languages described as having very few consonants. Hawaiian has eight consonants (p, k, ʔ, h, m, n, l w) and ten monophthongs (counting long vowels separately: a, e, i, o, u, ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) as well as a large number of diphthongs (almost any two short vowels can be put together in any order to form a diphthong). User:Angr 05:04, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Finnish word w/ vowels

The longest sensible word with most consecutive vowels is Finnish riiuuyöaieuutinen (courting night intention news [certainly yellow press stuff!])

What the heck is this? Is that supposed to be a translation of that word? And if so, what does it mean? That's a sensible word in Finnish? 141.151.181.162 04:40, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

I just listened to the spoken article - he says the Finnish word, and gives a translation of something "night intention news" - the first word doesn't sound like "courting", though, and the phrase still makes no sense to me. 141.151.181.162 04:57, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Spoken Word Version...

Listening to the spoken word version, it is difficult to place the accent and native language of the speaker; it does seem to drift. Were I a visually impared english speaker, I think I would likely be confused as to some of the english pronunciations. --Ayelis 08:45, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Forgotten Vowels

Y is always a vowel, NO acception. I don't care what modern curriculum tells us. Also, H,R,W are vowels because they do not have ANY consonant sound whatsoever. English would be weird if there where a third catogory, rather than a perfect two catagory system. Those are vowels hands down. I noticed this in elementary school and was astounded by the manner at which teachers never discussed this topic with us, and they've been teaching consonant sounds for YEARS (vowel sounds too, LOL). Death to disassociation!!!!!! My entry on these vowels was reverted by DireOrganic becasue of so called redundancy, and it was never mentioned in the first place. Are you just jealous that I firgured this out before you or any of you?

Bill Mclemore

This is incorrect. The usual sounds of the letters Y, R, and W as in YES, REST, and WEST are approximant consonants. The usual sound of H as in HOT is a fricative consonant. The letter Y sometimes represents a vowel sound (the near-close near-front unrounded vowel) in words like GYM and SYLLABLE and a diphthong in words like CRY and RYAN. I think you are confusing the vowel/consonant distinction with the sonorant/non-sonorant distinction. Nohat 01:39, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Actually H R W and Y shouldn't really be called vowels or consonants. And no, English doesn't have a three-category system in this respect, as the words "vowel" and "consonant" only really make sense in terms of sound. In a word like "happy" the letter y represents a vowel. In a word like "sky" it represents a diphthong. In a word like "yes" it represents a consonant (an approximant, as Nohat points out). OK, so it's reasonable that, if a particular letter always represents a vowel sound, we call it a vowel. But here's the problem: some letters sometimes represent vowels and sometimes represent consonants. It's nonsense to insist on the letter y being one or the other. garik 10:46, 17 May 2007 (UTC) edited by garik 15:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Any Possibility of Including Historical Usage of Vowels

Can anyone include a section on the historical usage of vowels, particularly that of its inclusion in written language? I would imagine that the history of vowel use would be more speculative in spoken language. But a history of its inclusion in alphabets and language groupings would be very useful. Stevenmitchell 10:11, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Discrepancy in 'Pronunciation in English'

As an example of the front open-mid unrounded vowel ɛ, 'fat' is listed for AuE and NZE. And then as an example for the front near-open unrounded vowel æ, 'fat' is listed not only for GA and RP, but also for AuE and NZE, which is a contradiction. I'm not very familiar with AuE/NZE, so I don't know which (ɛ or æ) is actually the vowel used in 'fat', but someone who does know should correct this. 71.224.131.233 21:35, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

History of vowels

Are there any articles in Wiki that cite about when was the 'first use of vowels in writing' exist? I need help. TY! Ü Zxyggrhyn 13:44, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Did you check History of writing? —Angr 17:27, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Written vowels in writing systems

I would like to remove the section Vowel#Written vowels in writing systems as it can easily spin out of control. We don't need a list of every language on the planet with an alphabetic writing system and the letters it uses to show vowels. —Angr 18:12, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree. The section's essentially pointless. garik 17:27, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

No one objected in the past month, so I finally got around to being bold and removing it. —Angr 11:19, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Unsourced section removed

I'm removing the section on Vowel systems since it has been tagged as unsourced since November. That's bad in any article, but especially bad in a featured article! If anyone can find and cite sources for it, feel free to re-add it. —Angr 16:22, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

New Zealand and Australia have totally different vowels

Australian English and New Zealand English are listed as having the same vowels on this page. Which would have any Australian rolling on the floor with laughter. New Zealand English is considered a joke in Australia due to their seemingly (to an Australian) random swapping of vowel sounds. Carl Kenner 05:45, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I think the entire "Pronunciation in English" section is dumb and should be removed. —Angr 06:34, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I was born and raised in a different part of the world, but have lived in both countries. There's certainly a difference (and there are regional differences within both countries too), but the similarities are far greater than the differences.-gadfium 07:26, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

Pronunciation in English

Inaccurate, unclear, unsourced, confusing, OR-prone, and not that important anyhow. AnGr too thinks it should be removed so, absent a timely objection, I'm gonna be bold and take the Del key to it. Jack^(Lumber) 16:26, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I'll second the deletion proposal. The whole thing belongs to a different page in the first place: [English phonolgy] or IPA chart for English. 石川 (talk) 02:03, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Long Vowels

_ _ IMO one inherent difficulty of this topic is that every native speaker has a strong gut knowledge of vowels of the corresponding language, but (at least in English) for most of them little has been done to help them connect the gut knowledge with formal analysis, except in the service of orthography.
_ _ In English, for most native speakers, the main focus of that analytical capability is how to distinguish, in reading and spelling, the words with long and short vowels; this especially appears in the "silent E makes the preceding vowel long" rule or rule-of-thumb. In contrast to that, i think most people will simply say that the a sounds in cat and car are "short", without awareness of how they differ. (In my experience, most Americans use the a of cat in "Hallelujah", and don't really notice what's different when they hear it pronounced with the car-style a. (I consider myself relatively well-informed in using what i think of as the singer's pronunciation, but i'm still ignorant enough to wonder which of those two short a sounds is a broad a, or whether that is something foreign to the mid-western accent Americans usually hear on the national news.)
_ _ Anyway, my point is that the entirety of the article is written at fairly sophisticated level. Has any thot been given to a new section, between the lead and the current "Articulation" section, that would help ease typical readers into the subject? One approach would be a very short section focusing on vowels that are easy to specify in English -- maybe just a couple of sentences, explicitly saying "for example", and a lk to Vowel sounds in English, with a section on each of the major dialects.
_ _ I don't intend to propose anything well thot thru with this note, but maybe to stimulate consideration of the possibility of lowering the barriers to interest in the existing content of the accompanying article.
--Jerzy•t 03:27, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

vocoids

We have, "The American linguist Kenneth Pike suggested the terms 'vocoid' for a phonetic vowel and 'vowel' for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology, [j] and [w] are classified as vocoids but not vowels."

Is the difference really ±stricture vs. ±syllabic? For those who distinguish semivowels from approximants, [j] and [w] should be contoids as well as consonants, correct? And for this usage, the /l/ in English table would count as a vowel and a contoid, but not a consonant. kwami (talk) 06:27, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Deleted comments about languages not distinguishing all V heights or backness. English does. Or was s.t. meant by those claims? kwami (talk) 14:54, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Most phonological theories don't permit a five-way backness distinction or a seven-way height distinction. Rather, the contrast between, for example, /i/ and /I/ is in tenseness vs. laxness, but otherwise both are [+high] and [–back] (or [+front]). Still, I think we're better off not trying to describe in this article how many levels of backness and height can be distinguished, since that gets us into the realm of theory-specific phonological argumentation instead of just-the-facts-please-ma'am phonetics. —Angr 19:20, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I think Ladefoged found five height levels in vowels which are distinguished by nothing else in some dialect of Swiss. This article got me thinking, though. If we take English height to not be distinctive because there are other correlates, then it follows that Spanish has no backness distinction, since all five vowels can be specified in terms of height and rounding. That seems rather out of touch with reality. kwami (talk) 19:29, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Or more likely, no roundness distinction since it's predictable from height and backness (all [+back, -low] vowels are also [+round]). Or look at Irish phonology where most theoretical phonologists have said the short vowels have no backness distinction (a position I used to believe but no longer do). These sorts of assumptions of underspecification are standard in phonological theory. —Angr 19:33, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

origin of the the vocalic "W" in English

I'm skeptical of the explanation which links the teaching of "w" as a vowel to Welsh loan words such as "cwm".

I have no issue either with "w" as a vowel or with the pronunciation of Welsh. I just find it highly unlikely that a redefinition of vowels and consonants in English would occur on the basis of a few fairly obscure loan words.

My understanding is that "w" is considered a vowel in ordinary English words when it forms part of a dipthong - e.g., the "ow" combination in "how now, brown cow." I believe that this is the more common (and likely) explanation for its inclusion as a part-time vowel in some systems of teaching English phonics.

Can someone either provide an authoritative reference for the loan word explanation, or else remove/change it?

24.62.163.33 (talk) 10:02, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

To be fair, it doesn't really make sense to say that any letter of the alphabet is a vowel or a consonant; they're letters, some of which always represent vowels, some of which always represent consonants, and some of which can represent either, depending on the word. It's easy to see why people refer to letters as vowels and consonants, but this is precisely the kind of thing that makes doing so unhelpful. So it doesn't really make much sense either to talk about a redefinition of vowels or consonants in English. It just happens that teachers give children a list of letters that are used to represent vowels in English (and call these vowels), and sometimes add y and w, which can represent vowels on some occasions. All that's redefined is teachers' understandable but not entirely accurate use of the word vowel, which shifts from meaning "letters that always represent vowels" to "letters that at least sometimes represent vowels".

But I agree that it's rather unsatisfactory to say that W is used to represent vowels in English, giving only one rare loanword as an example. Its use to represent the second part of a diphthong is considerably more notable. I'll change the article. I also agree that some sort of source about whether or not most teachers call W a vowel, and why, would be useful. garik (talk) 10:41, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Garik. And yes, of course it's merely the way we (or a certain group of us) talk about vowels (and consonants) that's being redefined, but that's the sense in which I was using the term "redefinition" - i.e., a change in the formalized distinctions made about them at certain levels, a recategorization within a certain system of instruction (in this case elementary-level phonics). As a college veteran of Latin, Greek, and even a bit of Hittite, I'd have to agree that any such basic system is way oversimplified and even counterproductive, but then, so is much of what we teach at this level - a dubious compromise of material that's really too abstract for the eight-year-olds it's taught to while at the same time not abstract enough to actually describe the phenomenon. Welcome to American education! :) (And thanks again!) 24.62.163.33 (talk) 15:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Article milestones

This Former featured articles lost it status as Featured article in November 2008 after a Fetured Articale review. It can regain Featured article status if the concerns highlighted by the review are addressed. See Wikipedia:Featured_article_review/archive/November_2008#Vowel. laurens (talk) 08:02, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Hard and soft vowels

Where do I find information on hard and soft vowels, and their grammatical implications? LarRan (talk) 11:07, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

I've only ever heard of "hard" and "soft" vowels with reference to the vowel letters of the Russian alphabet. Is that what you're talking about? +Angr 11:27, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Soft vowels could "soften" the preceding consonant, i.e. "gee" is pronounced "jee". "Go" isn't pronounced like "Joe", because o is a hard vowel. LarRan (talk) 13:13, 4 August 2009 (UTC) This is a common feature in many languages, I know for sure that it's found in English, Swedish, French, German and Italian. LarRan (talk) 07:16, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Okay, both things being discussed here may be called palatalization. Basically what happens is that front vowels tend to cause adjacent consonants to be pronounced in a more fronted way. This may, as in Russian, lead to phonemic palatalization, or as in English it may be important mostly from a historical perspective only. Mo-Al (talk) 07:27, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. LarRan (talk) 08:24, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Height, odd sentence

I took the following out of the Height section: "The vowels are 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'. Every word has to have a vowel in it to make it a proper word. However in words such as, sky and by, the letter 'y' takes the place of a vowel."

I think someone (probably young ;-) was trying to be helpful? (the information is covered later in writing systems) Robert Ullmann (talk) 10:16, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Other Vowels modernly called Consenants

I'm talking about the Vowel sound of H,R, and W. S is even kind of a 'cosenant/vowel." These first three should be in their own catagory of vowels, because they have no consenant sound whatsoever. What do you think? Maybe we should start a real modern movement right here on Wikipedia? Anyways, have a nice day. ------ Bill Mclemore —Preceding unsigned comment added by KillKill822 (talk • contribs) 01:37, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia isn't the place for starting movements, but you're right about H, R, and W. H, although generally classified as a consonant because of how it behaves, is phonetically speaking just a voiceless vowel. R (in English at any rate) and W are approximants with so little constriction they could qualify as semivowels. I think S is just a consonant, though. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 07:28, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

I think that Bill is referring to the fact that you can make word (even a sentence) out of a long s and no other sounds. Although you can do this with any of the fricatives and continuants in English (there are a lot of people in California named Ng), it may be most common with sibilants. Some languages have many words with such consonants standing in for vowels. — Solo Owl (talk) 16:57, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Ancient Greek, number of vowels etc

These two sentences have been removed and later restored (both actions were done without a comment) into the article: "Use of more vowels improve the speed of talk and thinking, but human ear cannot distinguish similar vowels. Old Greeks have more vowels than many other use languages at their time."

First, I changed it to remove some of what I judged obvious errors or inconsistencies, so it's currently: "Use of more vowels improves the speed of talking, but the human ear cannot distinguish similar vowels. Ancient Greek has more vowels than many other languages of the time."

I still see several problems with it even after this change, however.

1. That "the human ear cannot distinguish similar vowels" might be true... for some values of "similar". It's certainly false for most reasonable values, since the International Phonetic Alphabet is evidence that several languages do make phonemic distinctions between very close vowel qualities.
2. That "use of more vowels improves the speed of talking" might seem reasonable (more "short" words since you have more syllables at your disposal), but it ignores the amount of syllables that are allowed by consonant-related phonotactics, and it doesn't account for the possibility (for instance) that more vowels would cause speakers to emit slower utterances, to minimize ambiguity.
3. That "Ancient Greek had more vowels than many other languages of the time" also seems very dubious. For a start, we know extremely little about the phonetics of very many "languages of the time", and Ancient Greek doesn't seem to have such a particularly large vowel repertoir, to begin with.

Currently, those two sentences are "backed up" by this link. It is, however, a blog posting in Chinese; the authorship is not clear; and it doesn't "look" like a reliable source.

Not to mention that it appears to make some very bold statements (I have to rely on Google Translate, as I do not speak Chinese): "[...] before the evolution of Chinese is the world's most advanced language", "Chinese is the only language used in the computer age, the most suitable for voice control, rather than by hand", "Evidence of a history to explain the 'mystery': why the ancient Greeks even smarter than others". These and many more statements make this source even more and more dubious.

I will remove these sentence (and the reference) shortly unless a much better source is provided.

LjL (talk) 23:55, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with the removal. The idea that the number of vowel phonemes in a language can correlate with the "speed of thinking", or even the speed of talking, is simply nonsense. +Angr 07:05, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Glad to see this bit of bigotry excised. Especially since American English dialects illustrate the opposite. In drawled Southern American, the words Mary, merry, and marry are pronounced the same. (Just last month I saw "Marry Christmas mix" and "Mary Christmas mix" on home-burned CDs.) In the northeast dialects, spoken much faster than Southern, these vowels are always distinguished, with no problem in comprehension or thinking. — Solo Owl (talk) 17:21, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Vowel height

According to the wikipedia article on the Kensiu language this language contrasts true mid with open-mid and close-mid vowels without differences in other parameters such as backness or roundedness, so I added this information to the vowel height section which had previously said that no language is known to make this contrast. — Preceding unsigned comment added by John Stevens 20 (talk • contribs) 23:52, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Cool.

Such claims (either way) are difficult to justify, since we're dealing with a continuum. It's more straightforward to say how many heights are distinguished. But in this case it looks like they've made a good effort re. cardinal vowels. — kwami (talk) 01:53, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Spoken File

It's clear that the speaker in the audio version of this page is not a native speaker (Italian in the file's info). I have to really pay attention to what he says and it's very, very frustrating to try and decipher what he means when he mispronounces a word. How would I go about making a recording to replace this one? ·:RedAugust 13:23, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

This appears to be a different file since it has only single sounds rather than words, but to my American ear at least the I and ɨ, which are both American phonemes do not sound like the way these are pronounced in English. They sound like they have umlauts in them and/or are diphthongs. I think if I heard them pronounced they way they are here but in words, I would not know what the words were unless the rest of the phonemes told me. The idea of such a talking chart is great, but get someone pronouncing the sounds better and not all sounding with the same pronounced accent.202.179.16.88 (talk) 05:49, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

the team appeared weak and unea\\ before the people

the team appeared weak and uneasy before the people — Preceding unsigned comment added by 223.25.25.194 (talk) 03:19, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Vague/General Statements

It appears that the use of the word "some" in "some languages have vertical vowel systems in which..." is inappropriate because the statement is too general. If the statement was changed by removing "some" to a certain type/specific language, the statement would be factual and specific making it more appropriate.Angieghirra (talk) 07:37, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

The Great Vowel Shift

Under the "See Also" section, I have added a link to the article on the Great Vowel Shift. There was an early post on this discussion page asking for information on the history of vowel usage and I believe that this link may be beneficial to people looking for this information.

Also, I think that a section on this topic added to the article itself may be useful as well.

Jenga650 (talk) 01:20, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

I got bold and added a subsection on vowel shifts. It is sourced by reference to the article Great Vowel Shift. The unsourced claim at the end of the first paragraph is, I believe, common knowledge which needs no source, under Wikipedia guidelines. The last paragraph is unsourced because it is a simple logical deduction and extrapolation from the first paragraph. I thought of putting in a second paragraph on vowel shifts in other languages, but I do not have the knowledge or sources to make a general statement; perhaps someone can. (2 reasons for discussing the English Great Vowel Shift here: α, This is an English encyclopedia; β, hundreds of millions of people have been inconvenienced by the effects on learning to read English.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eall Ân Ûle (talk • contribs) 18:30, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

I believe the link to the article on the Great Vowel Shift was necessary so that the reader can come to terms with the historical aspect of vowel history, so good job inserting that! I don't think that a second paragraph on vowel shifts in other languages is necessary. Just stating that this does occur in other contexts and listing an example would be just enough to get the point across. Another entire paragraph related to another language would probably be too excessive.Angieghirra (talk) 18:27, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Wiki linked word addition

I think that adding a wiki link to the words nasality and phonation would be beneficial. The are found in the last sentence of the subheading "Articulation". Because these words aren't wiki linked, and they aren't explained in earlier text, this may bring up confusion to the reader in a number of ways. Does anyone else think that linking these two words would be beneficial? Angieghirra (talk) 17:48, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

I think the words acoustic and articulatory found under the sub heading height should also be wiki linked. Angieghirra (talk) 17:54, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Most frequent vowels?

Would it be possible to include which vowels are the most frequently used in human speech? It seems like the five vowels of Spanish [a, e, i, o, u] are among the most common, but which others? RobertM525 (talk) 08:39, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

I think that a frequent and important vowel is the rhotic vowels. Under the subheading "rhotic vowels", there is a shortage of information. The content is only one line long. I think that this needs to be expanded. It states that it is found in American English and a "few other languages". I think that they should note the other kinds of languages/ specific languages that it is found in. We could also include where it originated from and examples of these "R-coloured vowels." I do like however that they linked the article "R-coloured vowels" to the subheading section. Angieghirra (talk) 17:59, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

I do agree with the other person's suggestion on the fact that the section of rhotic vowels could possibly be expanded a little bit more since it appears quite often in some other languages, like Canadian French and Mandarin. Although there's a link that connects to furthermore information about "R-coloured vowels", i think it would be easier to understand if theres a little description on how its been used in English with an example, just to give a clear start on it. Overall, the whole article is really helpful. Tinalin728 (talk) 04:45, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

confusing and strange sound file for ʊ

The current sound file for ʊ that the reader finds when clicking on it (at Near-close near-back vowel) is obviously for an extremely unrounded version (apparently ɯ̽) that is only very rarely if ever used in the more common varieties of US and UK English (and German). Instead of removing the file, we should add a file for the most common pronunciation of the vowel in "put / hook". And the symbol for the unrounded vowel in the current sound file should be added to Vowel_diagram#IPA_vowel_diagram_with_added_material and IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio. --Espoo (talk) 09:57, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

Acoustics Section

Does anyone else agree that the acoustics section is a little longer than it should be and a bit wordy in terms of getting the point across about the formants? I do like the extensive use of wikipedia linking that started off the section. The words formants resonances spectrogram and resonant cavity were all linked just in the first 2-3 sentences of the section which I believe needed to be done to give the reader a full understanding of what was being discussed. I would however add one more case of linking in the word acoustics in the opening sentence of the section that iterated "The acoustics of vowels are very well understood. This would clarify any confusion of the branch of linguistics that what was about to be discussed right off the bat. Angieghirra (talk) 18:40, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

The acoustics section is not necessarily too long. However, everything that mentions F3 with respect to rounding of vowels is suspect and probably wrong. Unless a citation for this can be provided I am going to remove all indications that F3 is involved in the roundedness of vowels. Safulop (talk) 08:16, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

IPA navigation template

The IPA navigation template has been commented out (diff) with the edit summary (to avoid wp:Wikimedia Foundation error of 60-second timeout, cut 12-second, off-topic navbox {IPA navigation} as excessive focus on 1 form of vowel text while wp:data hoarding consonant links) (wikilinks as in original) and the inline wikitext comment 12-second, off-topic as only one form of pronunciation.

Both wikilinks in the edit summary are to essays, and the essay on Wikimedia Foundation error notes that timeouts are typically 60 seconds. From the edit summary and the comment left in the Wikitext I'm guessing that this template was adding 12 seconds to the page load time of the editor who removed it, and causing their page load to time out.

IMO it's not off-topic, and the comment only one form of pronunciation is enigmatic. And our page at consonant still contains the IPA navigation template, but that whole page while slower than most currently loads in under 6 seconds on my computer.

So I think this needs more explanation, and at least mention on this talk page - I can find no discussion of it here, have I missed it?

Watch this space, or feel free to comment here, especially if you know more. Andrewa (talk) 14:16, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Where Y is the vowel

why isn't there anything mentioned about the letter 'y' being a vowel or a sub-vowel? There are some words without conventional vowels. Here: Sky, spy, cry, my, why, shy, rhythm, etc. So can we consider 'y' as a vowel or sub-vowel? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.140.142.50 (talk) 12:36, August 27, 2007 (UTC)

The article says, "In the case of English, the five primary vowel letters can represent a variety of vowel sounds, while the letter Y can represent both vowels and a consonant." In the words you mention, y is standing for a vowel sound. In other words, like yellow and youth, it stands for a consonant sound. —Angr/talk 19:15, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

The Letter Y is not considered a vowel AT ALL in the UK, regardless of what semiotic or semantic arguments may be made for it. The status of Y in different English-speaking countries is an interesting issue and I was disappointed that it was not addressed here. The most basic thing to be said about vowels is how many of them there actually are. 143.252.80.100 (talk) 17:48, 28 November 2007 (UTC)Mullone

I don't quite understand what you mean. Are you saying that in UK "gym" is considered as having no vowel sounds? Or no vowel letters? Keith Galveston (talk) 14:39, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

It does not matter whether anyone "considers" this or that letter a vowel nor not. What matters is what makes sense from a linguistic point of view. A could surely declare - say - the letter Q to be a vowel. But that would make no linguistic sense. It wouldn't change anything about the letter Q, or the sound(s) it typically represents. It would just leave me with a classification of the letters in the English version of the Latin alphabet that makes no sense linguistically. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1700-talet (talk • contribs) 20:47, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

The debate here about the Letter Y being a vowel or not and whether it should of been mentioned a vowel or a sub vowel I believe is important to discuss. Although the comment was brought up that the letter y is not considered a vowel at all in the UK, it is important to realize that the status is different in other languages and it has a controversial interpretation in English languages as well. It should be addressed for what it is, stating the many interpretations of specific languages or groups/families of languages. I do not agree with the letter y being left out completely for this is vital information the reader should be aware of. Examples should also follow the explanation. Angieghirra (talk) 18:46, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

The problem is that people think of vowels as letters when they are actually just sounds that can be represented by various letters. Technically, AEIO and U are not vowels, but the sounds they represent are. So arguing over whether Y is a vowel is a little pointless, it can represent a vowel sound, yes, like the I sound in sky, but it's not a vowel, it's a letter. That being said though, the word "vowel", in general usage, basically means "letters that represent vowel sounds in almost every case", which is why Y often isn't included, but it CAN represent a vowel sound. Another letter that can represent a vowel that nobody ever thinks about is W, in the word cow it's an au dipthong, but nobody argues that we should include that in the list of vowels because it doesn't always represent a vowel. -ross616- (talk) 00:15, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Vowel. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive http://www.webcitation.org/67l7GWs8G?url=http://comonca.org.cn/lh/Doc/D13.pdf to http://comonca.org.cn/lh/Doc/D13.pdf
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090320021843/http://ed268.univ-paris3.fr/lpp/pages/EQUIPE/ridouane/audio.doc to http://ed268.univ-paris3.fr/lpp/pages/EQUIPE/ridouane/audio.doc

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 22:42, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Definition of Vowel in lead

The definition states " the tongue does not touch the lips, teeth, or roof of the mouth", but this is clearly not the case with close vowels - there is a lot of contact between the sides of the tongue and the upper molars in [i] and [u], and close back vowels have (as palatography demonstrates) substantial contact between the back of the tongue and the sides of the velum. This para needs some work (I have already made some minor corrections). RoachPeter (talk) 08:49, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

A Vowel Conundrum: Abbreviations

An interesting point I'd like to contribute here is that Abbreviations, even tough the first letter that they begin with is sometimes NOT a Vowel, SOMETIMES need to be said with a Vowel.

• F when not used as a Vowel: "That is a Fighter Plane."
• F when used as a Vowel: "That is an FN P90 Sub Machine Gun."
• N when not used as a Vowel: "That is a Navy Ship."
• N when used as a Vowel: That is an NKVD Unit."
• S when not used as a Vowel: "That is a Surfer."
• S when used as a Vowel: "That is an S.O.G. Unit."

--Arima (talk) 06:53, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

In your examples, F, N and S aren't used as vowels but as vowel-consonant sequences. It's also an orthographic issue, not a phonetic one. Mr KEBAB (talk) 15:15, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Number of Swedish vowel sounds

It seems to me that the article gives the wrong number of vowel sounds in Swedish. There are, at least in the major dialects, 23 vowel sounds (12 long and 11 short), as exemplified by the following list of words.

long

---

mat fan rep fin rot sur syn låt lät där lön mör

short

---

att ett in fort ull lott knytt lätt ärt mörk möss

PK

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.82.85.33 (talk) 00:38, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

The vowels in lät and där, lön and mör, lätt and ärt as well as in mörk and möss belong to the same phonemes. Mr KEBAB (talk) 13:22, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Glottis??

A vowel is a sound with ... no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis.

Wouldn't that imply thata glottal stop is a vowel? should the definition not be changed to be at any point above or including the glottis?. Grover cleveland (talk) 08:33, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the comment above. The definition of the glottis being "A vowel is a sound with... no buildup of air pressure at any point above the glottis" is implying that the glottal stop is in fact a vowel. The suggestion that was contemplating being about changing the phrase to "at any point above or including the glottis?" would be an improvement to this issue. Angieghirra (talk) 18:34, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Ɂinstead of that "the glottal stop is in fact a vowel," ɁI'd say that "every isolated/initial vowel has a glottal stop before it." Ɂin other words, glottal stop is the "default consonant." Ɂour glottises "generate" it naturally. Ɂit's a phonetic consonant which isn't written in IPA for English words. Wbxshiori (talk) 18:28, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

There is definitely an audible difference between initial glottal stop and initial zero, and in several languages that difference is phonemic. Double sharp (talk) 06:13, 11 January 2018 (UTC)

Firstly (in reply to Wbxshiori) it is factually incorrect to say that every vowel begins with a glottal stop, as I think I have explained before. Secondly, I can see no logical way in which the statement that 'A vowel is a sound with ... no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis' implies that a glottal stop is a vowel. Perhaps the problem in this passage arises because in a normal voiced vowel there *is* raised air pressure *below* the glottis (in order to generate phonation). In a glottal stop there is no raised air pressure in the glottis itself, only in the air passage below it. It is theoretically possible for there to be raised pressure *in* the glottis (with no constriction higher up in the vocal tract), but such an articulation would not be a glottal stop since the vocal folds would need to be opened to allow air pressure to build up between them. This would be typical of whispered speech, where the narrowed glottis and fast air-flow generates the noise spectrum used as a substitute for phonation. RoachPeter (talk) 09:38, 11 January 2018 (UTC)