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Topics related to "Vowel"

ablaut
ablaut [Ger.,=off-sound], in inflection , vowel variation (as in English sing, sang, sung, song ) caused by former differences in syllabic accent. In a prehistoric period the corresponding inflected forms of the language (known through internal reconstruction) had differences in accent rather tha... Read more
I
I 9th letter of the alphabet . This vowel can be pronounced with a short vowel sound, as the Ĭ in sit, or with a long vowel sound, like the ī in ride. The Greek correspondent is iota. J is a formal development from I. English is pronounced as a diphthong of ä and y. In c... Read more
umlaut
umlaut [Ger.,=transformed sound], in inflection , variation of vowels of the type of English man to men. In this instance it is the end product of the effect of a y (long since disappeared) that was present in the plural; the y caused the vowel before the n to be pronounced higher and mo... Read more
Altaic
Altaic , subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages ). Some scholars still consider Altaic an independent linguistic family. Spoken by over 130 million people, who occupy parts of a territory that stretches from E Europe across the Central Asian republics of K... Read more
O
O 15th letter of the alphabet . It is a usual symbol for a mid-back, rounded vowel, rather like the first part of oi. Such a vowel was represented by omicron [Gr.,=little o ], its formal and positional correspondent in the Greek alphabet. English ō is a diphthong of ŏ and w. In ... Read more
U
U 21st letter of the alphabet , corresponding to the Greek upsilon [Gr.,=u without the aspirate]. Until the late Middle Ages the capital was V, the minuscule u, no distinction being made between the consonantal and vocalic uses of the letter. The fixing of modern orthography, however, has rest... Read more
Hawaiian
Hawaiian member of the Polynesian group of the Austronesian family of languages. Of the fewer than 10,000 people who speak Hawaiian, only a few hundred are native speakers, but the language is taught in some Hawaiian schools and remains important as a symbol of ethnic identity. It also is an offici... Read more
Uralic and Altaic languages
Uralic and Altaic languages , two groups of related languages thought by many scholars to form a single Ural-Altaic linguistic family. However, other authorities hold that the Uralic and Altaic groups constitute two unconnected and separate language families. The Ural-Altaic tongues are spoken by ov... Read more
A
A first letter of the alphabet . A is a usual symbol for a low central vowel, as in father; the English long a ( ā ) is pronounced as a diphthong of ĕ and y. The corresponding letter of the Greek alphabet is named alpha. Alpha and omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, symbo... Read more
Portuguese language
Portuguese language member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages ). It is the mother tongue of about 170 million people, chiefly in Portugal and the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic (11 million speakers); in Brazil (154 milli... Read more

Encyclopedia entries related to "Vowel"

VOWEL
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language ...speech sound (also vowel letter ). In general...distinction between vowels in speech and writing...effect constituents of vowels. Highly characteristic of English vowel spellings is the...of short and long vowels corresponding to...to spell several vowel sounds for which...
VOWEL QUALITY
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language ...semihigh front unrounded vowel. Cardinal vowels While this general classification...The system of cardinal vowels provides a means of describing vowel sounds. Cardinal [i...close front spread vowel’. Most vowels in most languages combine...
VOWEL QUANTITY
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language ...a colon [:] after a vowel, as in /aː/. Vowels so marked have in general...x2018;light’ vowels. If a vowel has sufficient duration...move to more peripheral vowel positions, tense vowels tend to be peripheral...
VOWEL SHIFT
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language VOWEL SHIFT. A term in philology...under which a set of VOWELS undergoes changes. The term GREAT VOWEL SHIFT is used for a number...affected the English VOWEL system during the 15c...this shift, the long vowels in reed , rood changed...
THEMATIC VOWEL
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language ...the base is am , the thematic vowel -a- , and the STEM ama- . The vowel appears in all or most of the...accompanying table. Base Thematic vowel Addition Outcome aud (hear...garden-tending) Thematic vowels from Greek and Latin are common...
GREAT VOWEL SHIFT
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language ...articulation, the Middle English front VOWELS raised and fronted and the back vowels raised and backed; vowels already at the top became DIPHTHONGS with ah as the first element and the old vowel as the second, as in fine (see diagram...
WEAK VOWEL
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language WEAK VOWEL. In phonetics, a VOWEL that normally occurs only in unstressed syllables. There are two weak vowels in English SCHWA /ə/, as in the unstressed syllables of above and sofa , and short i /ɪ/, as in the unstressed syllables in RP example and Sophie .
SEMI-VOWEL
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language SEMI-VOWEL. See CONSONANT , GLIDE , VOWEL .
NEUTRAL VOWEL
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language NEUTRAL VOWEL. See SCHWA .
U
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language ...as V . The distinction in English between u as vowel and v as consonant was not made consistently in...movement: lip-rounding is a feature of the back vowel in put and truth and the front vowel in French tu ; /v/ is a labio-dental consonant...

Dictionary entries related to "Vowel"

vowel points
Book article from: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church vowel points. Hebrew was originally written without vowel signs. When the language was no longer spoken and there...traditional pronunciation being forgotten, a system of ‘vowel points’ was introduced. These are dots or strokes...
vowel
Book article from: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology vowel XIV. — OF. vouel , var. of voiel (superseded by later OF. voielle , mod. voyelle ):- L. vōcā...
long
Book article from: The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English ...was three pages long. 4. Phonet. (of a vowel) categorized as long with regard to quality...g., in standard American English, the vowel in food is long, as distinct from the short vowel in good ). ∎  Prosody...
short
Book article from: The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English ...rather short with her. 4. Phonet. (of a vowel) categorized as short with regard to quality...e.g., in standard British English the vowel in good is short as distinct from the long vowel in food ). ∎  Prosody...
U
Book article from: The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable ...the modified form usually represents the vowel u. In ME the symbols u and v both occur...began to distinguish lower case u as the vowel symbol and v as the consonant symbol...that century it was replaced, for the vowel, by capital U. From about 1700 the regular...
umlaut
Book article from: The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English ...x200A;¨ ) used over a vowel, as in German or Hungarian, to indicate a different vowel quality, usually fronting or rounding...Germanic languages) the process by which a back vowel becomes front in the context of another front...
diphthong
Book article from: The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable ...formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable, in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves towards another (as...sound of a diphthong or single vowel (as in feat ); a compound vowel character; a ligature (such as...
pronunciation guide
Book article from: A Dictionary of Buddhism ...important of these is that a macron above a vowel serves to lengthen it, roughly doubling...equivalents, with the exception of the long vowels ō and ū. As in the transliteration...letter indicates that the sound of the vowel is lengthened, thus kōan is...
vocalize
Book article from: The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English ...x220E;  [ intr. ] Mus. sing with several notes to one vowel. 2. Phonet. change (a consonant) to a semivowel or vowel. 3. write (a language such as Hebrew) with vowel points. DERIVATIVES: vo·cal·i·...
Hebrew
Book article from: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church ...signs for consonants. The absence of vowels was remedied first by using certain of the existing consonants to represent both vowels and consonants, and later by the development...a system of strokes and dots known as vowel points .

Thesaurus entries related to "Vowel"

a
Book article from: The Oxford American Writers Thesaurus ...is used before words beginning with a vowel sound. Since the sound rather than the...it's not unusual to find a before a vowel or an before a consonant. Hence: a European...an preceded most words beginning with a vowel, regardless of how the first syllable...

Related newspaper, magazine, and trade journal articles from HighBeam Research

Vowel patterns in the OED.
Magazine article from: Word Ways; 5/1/2004; ; 700+ words ; ...which includes 3 different vowels. There are 12 vowel trigrams beginning with...D-GLUCOSIDURONIC 8-vowel patterns With 8 vowels, there are 7 different...which includes 4 different vowels. There are 24 vowel tetragrams beginning with...
Vowel tetragrams revisited.
Magazine article from: Word Ways; 11/1/2003; ; 700+ words ; A Vowel Tetragram (VT) is a group of 4 vowels unbroken by any...and words with a vowel octagram (IJOUAOUOUENE...group of at least 8 vowels (5 overlapping...unbroken groups of vowels, at least one...Winnebago) has a vowel tetragram and a...
Vowel mutability: the case of monolingual Spanish listeners and bilingual Spanish-English listeners.
Magazine article from: Southwest Journal of Linguistics; 12/1/2002; ; 700+ words ; ...difficult to discriminate between vowels than between consonants in English...1996) showed that the longer a vowel's duration, the faster the vowel...correlated with the duration of the target vowels. This effect was not found for consonants...
Vowel harmony, centralization, and peripherality: the case of Pasiego(*).
Magazine article from: Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences; 1/1/2001; ; 700+ words ; ...can best be captured in terms of vowel peripherality. 2. Pasiego vowels and vowel features The Pasiego dialect of...articulatory characteristics of the vowels in system I as well as the fact that "the vowel [e] occupies a place [in the...
Vowel cascades, vowel movements and di-odes.
Magazine article from: Word Ways; 2/1/2002; 700+ words ; ...Richard Lederer used the term "vowel movements" to describe those...which runs the gamut of the vowels. These were first introduced...the longest possible five-vowel examples. He offered blander...February 1994. The shortest vowel movements other than a e i o...
Creating Accurate Vowels Sounds
Magazine article from: The Canadian Music Educator; 1/1/2007; ; 700+ words ; ...bees' knees, ("ee" vowel only) 2. Ma saw Pa draw straws, ("ah" vowel only) 3. She thought...ee" and "ah" vowels) Sarah would say the...accessible layout of different vowels and the tongue positions...tongue positions and the vowel sounds they create...
Intelligibility of Prolonged Vowels in Classical Singing*
Magazine article from: Journal of Singing; 1/1/2007; ; 700+ words ; ...relative to the vowels used in vocalises...During speech, vowel targets are reached...intelligibility of sung vowels would decrease if the sung vowel was not used in...intelligibility of eleven sung vowels and the singer's intended vowel as judged by a different...
The phonetics of Paici vowels.
Magazine article from: Oceanic Linguistics; 12/1/2004; ; 700+ words ; ...the oral and nasalized vowels of Paici. It is shown that vowel qualities posited in...interest for its extensive vowel system. It has ten oral vowels and seven nasalized vowels...further data on how the vowels in large vowel systems are distributed...
Clues emerge from vowels of the brain. (how the brain identifies vowels and consonants)
Magazine article from: Science News; 9/21/1991; ; 700+ words ; ...could not come up with any vowels. This vowel-specific disturbance...an incorrect alternative vowel or transposed two vowels in the same word. For example...total inability to pluck vowels from the cerebral vowel organizer, whereas in the...
[-ATR] HARMONY AND THE VOWEL INVENTORY OF SUMERIAN
Magazine article from: Journal of Cuneiform Studies; 1/1/2007; ; 700+ words ; ...descriptions of the Sumerian vowel inventory are restricted to the four vowels that are visible...system with four vowel-qualities (/a...any Sumerian vowels that cannot be represented...apparently homophonous vowel graphemes might also conceal two different vowels. The strongest ...