vowel

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vowel

A vowel is a letter that represents a speech sound made with one’s airway (the mouth and vocal chords) open and without touching one’s tongue to the teeth, lips, or the roof of the mouth. It is contrasted with consonants, which are formed by obstructing one’s airway in some way so as to create a harder, more defined speech sound. Together, vowels and consonants form syllables in speech.
There are five letters that are considered to be true vowels: A, E, I, O, and U.
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vowel

[′väu̇əl]
(linguistics)
A voiced "open sound," in which the quality of the sound is determined by its placement in the mouth.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
References in periodicals archive ?
This ranking is also attested in Hall et al.'s (2006) experimental study with German and Polish alveolar stop-high vocoid sequences in nonce words, in which the friction phase in /dj/ sequences was significantly longer than that in /di/ sequences.
This article examines stop assibilations--defined here as processes that convert a (coronal) stop to a sibilant affricate or fricative before high vocoids, e.g., /t/ is realized as [ts] or [s] before /i/.
Stop assibilations (or assibilations for short) are defined here as processes whereby stops become sibilant affricates or sibilant fricatives before high vocoids. Three examples of such rules have been presented in (1).
the trigger is some subset of the high front vocoids (i.e., /i j/)
In (3a) we have presented an example of a language in which assibilation is not triggered by a subset of the high front vocoids. The process in (3b) is the only example to our knowledge of a process in which a nonsibilant fricative is the output.
Recall from (2a) that the trigger for stop assibilation is some set of the high front vocoids (i.e., the vowel /i/ and glide /j/).
High-ranking SYLL-WELL forces the simplification of complex nuclei and *P/[Alpha] favors the preservation of the vocoid of higher sonority; the most harmonic peak, (35b).
that must be simplified in TF in order to abide by *COMPLEX, a member of SYLL-WELL.(10) Considering that the feature [-anterior] of the high vocoid is preserved by the TF correspondent of the consonant that precedes it (e.g.
(10.) As was shown above, complex nuclei must be simplified through the deletion of the less-sonorous vocoid of the diphthong since this enables the violation of a lower-ranking antipeak constraint.
*COMPLEX, on the other hand, prohibits clusters, of both consonants and vocoids, under a syllable position node.
(9.) I follow McCarthy and Prince in assuming that vocoids (but also h) are nasalized, despite Onn's transcribing these forms orally.

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