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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 VOWEL A term in general use and in phonetics for...that is distinct from a CONSONANT (also vowel sound ) and the LETTER of the ALPHABET that represents such a speech sound (also vowel letter ). In general usage, the distinction...
VOWEL QUANTITY
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language VOWEL QUANTITY. A term in phonetics and poetics for the length of a VOWEL , usually indicated in phonetic transcription by a LENGTH MARK [ː] or a colon [:] after a vowel, as in /aː/. Vowels so marked have in...
VOWEL QUALITY
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language VOWEL QUALITY. A term in phonetics for the property that makes one VOWEL sound different from another: for example, /i...sheep from /ɪ/ as in ship . The quality of a vowel is determined by the position of the tongue, lips...
THEMATIC VOWEL
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language THEMATIC VOWEL, also thematic . In an inflected language like Greek or Latin, the VOWEL which adheres to a root or base, to form its stem or theme. This vowel then usually controls the inflectional and derivational affixes attaching to it...
VOWEL SHIFT
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language VOWEL SHIFT. A term in philology and phonetics for a...set of VOWELS undergoes changes. The term GREAT VOWEL SHIFT is used for a number of longterm changes which affected the English VOWEL system during the 15c–17c. In this...
GREAT VOWEL SHIFT
Book article from: Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language GREAT VOWEL SHIFT. A sound change that began c. 1400...with ah as the first element and the old vowel as the second, as in fine (see diagram...u in crude . See E , LATIN , JESPERSEN , VOWEL SHIFT. Compare GRIMM'S LAW.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
diphthong
Book article from: The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable ...single syllable, in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves towards another (as in coin , loud...representing the sound of a diphthong or single vowel (as in feat ); a compound vowel character; a ligature (such as æ...
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·...
drawl
Book article from: The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English ...x2022; v. [ intr. ] speak in a slow, lazy way with prolonged vowel sounds: [with direct speech ] “Suits me fine...lazy way of speaking or an accent with unusually prolonged vowel sounds: a Texas drawl. DERIVATIVES: drawl·er n...
epi-
Book article from: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology epi- prefix repr. Gr. epi- , before an unaspirated vowel ep- , before an aspirated vowel eph- , a use of the adv.-prep. epí on, upon, over, close up in time or space, in addition (to) = Skr. ápi moreover, also...

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 ; ...and 87024). Words exhibiting other special vowel patterns appear to have been largely overlooked. These include words with tautonymic vowel patterns (123123 etc.), palindromic vowel patterns (12321 etc.) and consecutive doubled...
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 ; ...Abstract Although many different cases of vowel harmony can be found in the world's languages...Pasiego, however, evinces a process of vowel harmony that clearly does not fit into...argued, can best be captured in terms of vowel peripherality. 1. Introduction There...
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 ; ...altered to a word by changing either one vowel or one consonant. Van Ooijen found that...consonant-change condition than in the vowel-change condition and were generally faster in the vowel-change condition, an effect she called...
Vowel tetragrams revisited.
Magazine article from: Word Ways; 11/1/2003; ; 700+ words ; A Vowel Tetragram (VT) is a group of 4 vowels unbroken...Words which contain a VT can be called Vowel Tetragram Words (VTWs). Relatively few...appear in items with a non-VT context. Vowel Tetragrams by Darryl Francis (74140) is...
Vowel cascades, vowel movements and di-odes.
Magazine article from: Word Ways; 2/1/2002; 700+ words ; ...Ways, Richard Lederer used the term "vowel movements" to describe those rather musical...asking for the longest possible five-vowel examples. He offered blander blender blinder...Grant's, in February 1994. The shortest vowel movements other than a e i o u itself are...
[-ATR] HARMONY AND THE VOWEL INVENTORY OF SUMERIAN
Magazine article from: Journal of Cuneiform Studies; 1/1/2007; ; 700+ words ; ...accepted that Sumerian exhibited some form of vowel harmony, and early descriptions of Sumerian vowel harmony (Poebel 1931; Kramer 1936) framed that harmony data in the context of a six-vowel inventory. While the arguments in favor of...
On the origin of Philippine vowel grades.
Magazine article from: Oceanic Linguistics; 12/1/2006; ; 700+ words ; The concept of vowel grade by which morphological features in...signaled by change in the quality of the vowel of a given form has long been recognized...demonstrate some of the processes by which vowel grades developed in some Philippine languages...
Vowel-consonant patterns (Part 1).(word games)
Magazine article from: Word Ways; 11/1/2002; ; 700+ words ; In Vowel-Consonant Patterns (Word Ways 77221...possible 128 ([2.sup.7]) 7-letter vowel-consonant (V-C) patterns. Somewhat...August 1949 issue of The Enigma. 2. WW69136 Vowel Language by Temple G. Porter is a crossword...
Vowel sounds influence our perceptions about products
News Wire article from: The Hindustan Times; 9/13/2007; 629 words ; ...study has found that phonetic symbolism or vowel sounds influence our perceptions about...suggests that that product names with vowel sounds that transmit positive qualities...research has shown that the two types of vowel sounds - front vowel sounds, for e.g...
Vowel production in children using Cochlear implants
Magazine article from: The Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology; 12/1/2000; ; 700+ words ; ...The RAFT procedure includes the coding of vowel tokens on the basis of height and place...Alphabet symbol was identified for each vowel produced in order to evaluate the approximation of the vowel production to that of the target word...