VOWELS

Welcome to this lecture headed “VOWELS”. We will be discussing all about vowels. Enjoy your lecture.

Vowels are letter of the alphabet (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y) that stands for a speech sound produced by the comparatively free passage of breath through the larynx and oral cavity. Letters that are not vowels are consonants

When sounding vowels, your breath flows freely through the mouth.

Five of the 26 alphabet letters are vowels: A, E, I, O, and U. The letter Y is sometimes taken as a sixth vowel because it can sound like other vowels.

Unlike consonants, every one of the vowel letters has more than one type of sound or can even be silent with no sound at all.

Vowel sound is a speech sound made by the vocal cords. It is as well a type of letter in the alphabet.

The letters of the English alphabet are either vowels or consonants or both. A vowel sound comes from the lungs, via the vocal cords, and is not blocked, thus there is no friction. All English words have vowels.

The letter Y can be a vowel (like in the word “cry” or “candy”), or it can be a consonant (like in “yellow”).

These five or six letters stand for about 20 vowel sounds in the majority of English accents. 

This significant fact assists to explain why pronunciation can be difficult for both native speakers and learners of English.

The rest of the letters of the alphabet are consonants:

As explained below, spoken English has just about 20 different vowel sounds, though there are dialectal differences.

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as an English ah! /ɑː/ or oh! /oʊ/, pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis.

This contrasts with consonants, like English sh! [ʃː], which have a restriction or closure at specific points along the vocal tract.

A vowel is as well understood to be syllabic: an corresponding open but non-syllabic sound is known as a semivowel.

In every oral languages, vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables, while consonants form the onset and (in languages that have them) coda.

A few languages as well permit other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, like the syllabic l in the English word table [ˈtheɪ.bl̩] (the stroke under the l shows that it is syllabic; the dot separates syllables)—which, nonetheless, a lot still consider to have a weak vowel sound [ˈtʰeɪ.bəl]—or the r in Croatian or Serbian vrt [vr̩t], meaning “garden”.

There is a disagreement between the phonetic definition of “vowel” (a sound produced with no constriction in the vocal tract) and the phonological definition (a sound that forms the peak of a syllable). 

The approximants [j] and [w] shows this conflict: both are produced without much of a constriction in the vocal tract (therefore phonetically they appear to be vowel-like), but they happen on the edge of syllables, like at the beginning of the English words “yet” and “wet” (which suggests that phonologically they are consonants).

The American linguist Kenneth Pike(1943) suggested the terms “vocoid” for a phonetic vowel and “vowel” for a phonological vowel. Therefore, making use of this terminology, [j] and [w] are grouped as vocoids but not vowels.

In English, the word vowel is normally used to mean both vowel sounds and the written symbols that represent them.

The articulatory features that differentiate diverse vowel sounds are said to establish the vowel’s quality.

The common features ARE height (vertical dimension), backness (horizontal dimension) and roundedness (lip position). These three parameters are indicated in the schematic IPA vowel diagram on the right.

There are however still more possible features of vowel quality, such as the velum position (nasality), type of vocal fold vibration (phonation), and tongue root position.

Height

Vowel height is named for the vertical position of the tongue in relation to either the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw.

In high vowels, like [i] and [u], the tongue is positioned high in the mouth, while in low vowels, like [a], the tongue is positioned low in the mouth.

The IPA prefers the terms close vowel and open vowel, which correspondingly describe the jaw as open or closed.

Nevertheless, vowel height is an acoustic instead of an articulatory quality and is defined not in terms of tongue height, or jaw openness, but according to the relative frequency of the first formant (F1).

The higher the F1 value, the lower (more open) the vowel; height is thus inversely correlated to F1.

The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies seven different vowel heights:

close vowel (high vowel)

near-close vowel

close-mid vowel

mid vowel

open-mid vowel

near-open vowel

open vowel (low vowel)

The letters [e ø ɤ o] are naturally used for either close-mid or true-mid vowels, but, if more precision is needed, true-mid vowels may be written with a lowering diacritic [e̞ ø̞ ɤ̞ o̞].

Although English contrasts six heights in its vowels, these are mutually dependent with variations in backness, and a lot of them are parts of diphthongs.

The parameter of vowel height seems to be the major cross-linguistic feature of vowels due to the fact that all languages use height as a contrastive feature. No other parameter, like front-back or rounded/unrounded (see below), is used in all languages.

Backness

Tongue positions of cardinal front vowels with highest point shown.

The position of the highest point is used to establish vowel height and backness

Vowel backness is named for the position of the tongue during the articulation of a vowel in relation to the back of the mouth.

In front vowels, such as [i], the tongue is placed forward in the mouth, while in back vowels, like [u], the tongue is positioned towards the back of the mouth.

Nevertheless, vowels are defined as back or front not according to real articulation, but according to the relative frequency of the second formant (F2).

The higher the F2 value, the fronter the vowel; the lower the F2 value, the more retracted the vowel.

The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies five diverse degrees of vowel backness:

front vowel

near-front vowel

central vowel

near-back vowel

back vowel

Although English has vowels at all five degrees of backness, there is no known language that distinguishes all five without extra differences in height or rounding.

Front, raised, and retracted

The start of the tongue moving in two directions, high–low and front–back, is not supported by articulatory verification. Nor does it elucidate how articulation affects vowel quality.

Vowels may in its place be characterized by the three directions of movement of the tongue from its neutral position: front, raised, and retracted.

Front vowels ([i, e, ɛ] and to a smaller extent [a, i, ɘ, ɜ], etc.) can be secondarily qualified as close or open, as in the traditional conception, but rather than there being a unitary category of back vowels, this regrouping posits raised vowels, where the body of the tongue approaches the velum ([u, o, i, etc.), and retracted vowels, where the root of the tongue approaches the pharynx ([ɑ, ɔ], etc.).

Membership in these categories is scalar, with the mid-central vowels being marginal.

Roundedness

Roundedness means whether the lips are rounded or not. In most languages, roundedness is a reinforcing feature of mid to high back vowels, and is not distinctive. Normally the higher a back vowel is, the more intense the rounding.

Different kinds of labialization are as probable. In mid to high rounded back vowels the lips are usually protruded (“pursed”) outward, a occurrence known as exolabial rounding due to the insides of the lips are visible, while in mid to high rounded front vowels the lips are generally “compressed”, with the margins of the lips pulled in and drawn towards each other, an occurrence referred to as endolabial rounding. 

In a lot of phonetic treatments, both are considered forms of rounding, but some phoneticians do not believe that these are subsets of a particular incident of rounding, and prefer instead the three independent terms rounded (exolabial), compressed (endolabial), and spread (unrounded).

Nasalization

Nasalization means whether a few of the air escapes through the nose. In nasal vowels, the velum is lowered, and a few air travels through the nasal cavity In addition to the mouth. An oral vowel is a vowel in which all air escapes through the mouth. 

Phonation

Voicing describes whether the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation of a vowel. Modal voice, creaky voice, and breathy voice (murmured vowels) are phonation types that are used contrastively in a few languages. Frequently, these co-occur with tone or stress distinctions

Tongue root retraction

Advanced tongue root (ATR) is a feature widespread across much of Africa, the Pacific Northwest, and scattered other languages. The difference between advanced and retracted tongue root resembles the tense/lax contrast acoustically, but they are articulated in a different way. ATR vowels involve noticeable tension in the vocal tract.

Secondary narrowings in the vocal tract

Pharyngealized vowels take place in a few languages; A stronger degree of pharyngealisation occurs in the Northeast Caucasian languages and the Khoisan languages. These might be called epiglottalized, since the primary restriction is at the tip of the epiglottis.

The greatest degree of pharyngealisation is located in the strident vowels of the Khoisan languages, where the larynx is raised, and the pharynx constricted, so that either the epiglottis or the arytenoid cartilages vibrate rather than the vocal cords.

Note that the terms pharyngealized, epiglottalized, strident, and sphincteric are occassionally used interchangeably.

Rhotic vowels

Rhotic vowels are the “R-colored vowels” of American English and a few other languages.Tenseness/checked vowels against free vowels

Tenseness is used to describe the opposition of tense vowels as in leap, suit vs. lax vowels as in lip, soot. This opposition has conventionally been thought to be a result of greater muscular tension, however phonetic experiments have repetitively failed to show this.

Unlike the other features of vowel quality, tenseness is only applicable to the few languages that have this opposition (mainly Germanic languages, e.g. English), while the vowels of the other languages cannot be described with respect to tenseness in any meaningful way.

In discourse about the English language, “tense and lax” are frequently used interchangeably with “long and short”, correspondingly, due to the features are concomitant in the widespread varieties of English. This cannot be applied to all English dialects or other languages.

“In all vowels, the mouth passage is unobstructed. If it is obstructed at any time during the production of a speech-sound, the resulting sound will be a consonant.”

“In written English, the 26 letters of the alphabet make up 5 vowels and 21 consonants. In spoken English, there are 20 vowels and 24 consonants. It is this discrepancy, of course, which underlies the complication of English spelling.

Thanks for reaching to this point marking the end of this lecture.

Your Lecture Master:

Mst. Ugonwanne Joshua