Languages & Linguistics
Vowel Chart
A vowel chart is a visual representation of the vowel sounds in a language, typically displayed on a grid with the position of the tongue and lips. It helps linguists and language learners understand and compare the different vowel sounds in a systematic way. Vowel charts are used to analyze and describe the vowel systems of various languages.
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eBook - PDFA Manual of English Phonetics and Phonology
Twelve Lessons with an Integrated Course in Phonetic Transcription
- Paul Skandera, Peter Burleigh(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Narr Francke Attempto Verlag(Publisher)
Just as we have arranged the symbols for consonant phonemes in a table, we can also arrange the symbols for vowels schematically on the basis of these two criteria. Depending on the particular language under description, the vowel symbols are superimposed on the space within a triangle or a quadrilateral. Such a Vowel Chart, or vowel diagram, was first devised by Daniel Jones. It reflects roughly the space in the centre of the mouth, where the vowels are articulated. You will find a Vowel Chart containing the symbols for all RP vowel phonemes on the inside back cover of this manual, and it is recommended that you refer to it as you continue reading this lesson. The closeness or openness of a vowel is shown by the vertical position of the symbol in the Vowel Chart: The higher the symbol, the closer the tongue is to the palate when articu- lating the corresponding sound. Conversely, the lower the symbol, the more open the gap between the tongue and the palate. In other words, close vowels occupy the upper part of the Vowel Chart, and open vowels the lower part. Two horizontal lines mark the mid-close and mid-open positions. Frontness or backness is indicated by the horizontal position of the symbols: The farther left the symbol, the more front the part of the tongue that is raised highest when articu- lating the corresponding sound. Thus the symbols on the left of the Vowel Chart represent front vowels. The farther right the symbol, the more back the part of the tongue involved. The symbols on the right, then, represent back vowels. It goes without saying that the vowels in the central area of the chart are central vowels. The vowel systems of most languages of the world can be represented by symbols that are evenly distributed within the Vowel Chart. This phenomenon is called vowel disper- sion. Most vowel systems are arranged within a triangle. English belongs to the less than 10 per cent of the languages whose vowel systems have a more or less quadrilateral shape.
eBook - PDF- Victor Yngve, Zdzislaw Wasik(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
1. Physical description of vowels The following is a brief tutorial on the typical ways in which vowels have been described in articulatory and acoustic terms to aid those without phonetic training in understanding the work outlined below. 50 ¥ LAURA L. KOENIG As in any review, this description is simplified, and omits many details not critical for present purposes. More extensive discussions of vowel description can be found in introductory phonetics texts (e.g. Ladefoged 1993; MacKay 1987). The relationships between vowel articulation and acoustics have been explored by many researchers over the years, including Chiba and Kajiyama (1941), Fant (1960), Gay, Boe, and Perrier (1992), Lindblom and Sundberg (1971), and Stevens and House (1961). Vowels can be defined simply as linguistic sounds produced with a relatively open vocal tract and little impedance to airflow. Three articulatory parameters that differentiate vowels in many languages of the world are (a) the degree of opening of the jaw-tongue complex; (b) the relative position of the tongue mass in the supralaryngeal vocal tract; and (c) the configuration of the lips. The first dimension is usually referred to as vowel height: high vowels have relatively high jaw-tongue positions, whereas low vowels are more open. Raising the tongue from the floor of the mouth also tends to draw the root of the tongue forward and expand the pharyngeal cavity, so some authors speak in terms of tongue root position or pharyngeal width (e.g. Lindau 1979). The second dimension has to do with whether the bulk of the tongue is shifted towards the alveopalatal region (front vowels) or the velar/uvular region (back vowels). Lip configurations usually include rounded or unrounded/spread. Much of the variation in these three articulatory parameters is reflected acoustically in the first and second resonant (or formant) frequencies of the vocal tract (Fl and F2, respectively).
eBook - ePub- Patricia Ashby(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
6 Describing vowelsThis chapter discusses the way in which phoneticians describe vowel sounds, introducing the Cardinal Vowels and outlining the principal parameters of vowel quality variation. It compares vowels and consonants and establishes the vowel labelling system employed by phoneticians. Representations of vowels are explored, including waveforms and spectrographic images as well as impressionistic records (vowel diagrams, including the IPA Chart vowel diagram, and the use of diacritics in the phonetic transcription of vowels).6.1 BASIC PARAMETERS OF VOWEL DESCRIPTION6.1.1 The vowel-consonant relationshipKnowledge accumulated so far about the parts of the tongue (Chapter 2 ), relationships between active and passive articulators (Chapter 3 ), and the scale of strictures (Chapter 4 ) means we already know quite a lot about vowels.Vowels are made well back in the vocal tract, using only the body of the tongue – the front, centre and back (see Figure 3.4 on p. 34). In terms of place of articulation, therefore, they are located between palatal and velar. In addition to this, they are located at the lowest end of the scale of strictures, being sounds produced with wide or open approximation between the active and passive articulators, which makes them members of the sonorant category of speech sounds.Chapter 4 focused on different manners of consonant articulation and asked you to think about what you could feel when you articulated particular consonant sounds. If we now compare what was felt for consonant sounds with what we feel when prolonging an [ɑ]-like sound – say a long, drawn-out Ah! – we start to identify the rather different nature of vowel articulation. If I asked you to describe [ɑ] in the way in which it was possible to describe [m] or [l] or [d], you would find it impossible. You can feel that the jaw aperture is quite wide (a feeling confirmed by looking in the mirror) but after that, it is difficult to be precise. You may have the impression (because you can’t really feel it at all) that the tongue seems low in the mouth. But that is only an impression because there is really no tactile feedback of the sort available for bilabials like [m] or for the alveolar stop consonants like [n], [l], [d] or [t]. Even if you sustain the sound, making a very long [ɑ ] (note the addition of the ‘longer than’ or length diacritic [
eBook - PDFThe Sounds of Language
An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology
- Elizabeth C. Zsiga(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Vowel Charts, which graphed the positions of the vowels of a language relative to the cardinal vowels, were often used. With the advent of audio recorders and digital means of measuring sound quality, the cardinal vowel system has fallen out of use. Vowel Charts made today are usually based on measurements made by a computer from a recorded sound. The cardinal vowels are still a useful system of reference when a computer isn’t handy, however. You can still access a record- ing of Jones’ pronunciations on the web (see references on the website at http://www.wiley.com/go/zsiga). The IPA Vowel Chart, reproduced in Figure 4.2, is similar to Jones’ cardinal Vowel Chart, but with some extra symbols added. (Jones was a leading member of the International Pho- netic Association.) You can see the eight primary cardinal vowels around the edge of the chart. The secondary cardinal vowels are paired with them: as noted in the chart, pairs of vowels are identical in tongue position, and the vowel with A MAP OF THE VOWELS 59 lip rounding is on the right. Jones’ original cardinal vowels line up with the horizontal lines. Additional vowels have been placed in the spaces between. As with the consonant chart, this represents a lot of symbols to process all at once, and some are more common and useful than others. For our discussion of the vowels, we’ll begin with the most common vowel system: [i, e, a, o, u], and the basic dimensions of height and backness. From there, we’ll see how more complex systems may increase their inventories. Table 4.1 Five contrasting vowels in Spanish and Hawai’ian. Hawai’ian examples are taken from http:// www.phonetics.ucla.edu/index/language.html Front Back Spanish High [si] yes [su] hers/his/its/yours Mid [se] self [sopa] soup Low [sala] room Hawai’ian High [kiki] sting [kuku] to beat (tapa) Mid [keke] turnstone [koko] blood Low [kaka] rinse Figure 4.3 A typical five-vowel system.
eBook - PDF- Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Figure 1.5 charts the positions of (GA) English vowels relative to each other, based roughly on the position of the highest point of the tongue during that vowel. The vowel space is larger at the top than at the bottom, because there is more room for tongue movement closer to the palate. (The astute reader will notice some differences in exactly where the vowel symbols are placed in Figures 1.4 and 1.5 , particularly for low and central vowels . This is because the IPA provides many more symbols than are needed in any one language. If a linguist is concerned primarily with a general description of the set of sounds that are needed to distinguish the words of a language (as we are here), he/she will usually choose the more familiar symbols from among those the IPA makes available.) ..................................................................................................................................................................................... ..................................................................................................................................................................................... ..................................................................................................................................................................................... ..................................................................................................................................................................................... ..................................................................................................................................................................................... .....................................................................................................................................................................................
- Paul Carley, Inger Mees(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
5.1 Describing vowels We saw in Chapter 2 that a consonant is a speech sound that involves an obstruction to the air - stream on its way through the vocal tract. So what then is a vowel? A vowel is the opposite of a consonant: a sound made with no obstruction in the vocal tract to the air as it passes through it. Say a long /ɑ/, the sound doctors ask us to make when they want to look into our mouths, and feel how the air flows out through your mouth without any obstruction. Try the same for /i/, the of tree, and /æ/, the of cat. You will notice that the lips and tongue take dif- ferent positions for these different vowels, but in each case, there’s no obstruction or block- age of the kind that we find in consonants. If consonants are analyzed in terms of the kind of obstruction involved and where it is in the vocal tract, how can we analyze vowels, which have no such obstruction? Although the tongue and lips assume a wide range of complex shapes for the articulation of different vowels, a relatively simple system has been developed to describe them. Figure 5.1 shows the vowel diagram from the chart of the International Phonetic Association, which is based on this system of vowel description. 5.1.1 Tongue shape In order to understand the system behind the diagram, the first step is to explore the limits of the range of tongue positions used to make vowels, known as the vowel space. There are two fixed articulatory reference points to the system. To find the first, you make a vowel with the front of the body of your tongue pushed as far forward and as far up toward the hard palate as possible. This is the position for the [i] vowel (see Figure 5.2). If you move your tongue any further forward or up, audible friction would result between the tongue and the hard palate, and the sound would no longer be a vowel.
eBook - PDF- Pamela Rogerson-Revell(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
(Roach 2000:14) Teachers of English may wonder whether such a classification is useful but they can act as an important reference point for an understanding of the vowel similarities and contrasts between languages and between varieties of English. 1 Summary Vowels are characterized by a lack of audible friction, by a relatively unhindered passage of the airstream through the vocal tract. In BBC English there are: five long vowels: /i:/; / ɜ :/; / ɑ :/; / ɔ :/; /u:/; seven short vowels: / ɪ /; /e/; /æ/; / ʌ /; / ɒ /; / ʊ /; / ə /; eight diphthongs: / ɪə /; /e ə /; / ʊə /; /e ɪ /; /a ɪ /; / ɔɪ /; / əʊ /; /a ʊ /; Distinctions applying to vowels involve the relative degree of openness or closeness depending on the raising of the highest point of the tongue. In addition, vowels are classified as front , central or back depending upon the part of the tongue which is raised. Vowels 87 Activity 25 To check your knowledge of the English vowel system, place all the vowels on the chart below, plotting the positions of articulation: front central bac k Teaching implications It appears that accurate vowel sounds are harder to learn than consonants, possibly because there is no tongue contact to act as a reference point, unlike consonants. This distinction between vowels and consonants may be why consonants tend to be acquired more efficiently through speaking tasks, whereas vowel distinctions may be more efficiently accomplished through listening tasks (Fucci et al. 1977, Leather 1983, Chun 2002). The two key distinguishing characteristics of vowels are quality and quantity; quality relates to the position of the tongue and lips while quantity relates to the duration of the sound. While quantity is relatively stable across varieties of English, there are considerable variations in quality. So, for instance, ‘shut’ might be pronounced / ʃʌ t / in BBC English and / ʃʊ t / in northern varieties.
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