Vertical vowel system

Last updated

A vertical vowel system is the system of vowels in a language that requires only vowel height to phonemically distinguish vowels. Theoretically, rounding, frontness and backness could also be used in one-dimensional vowel systems; however, vertical refers specifically to the usage of vowel height as the sole distinguishing feature.

Contents

Vertical vowel systems have only been uncovered in the underlying representation of various languages' phonology. Phonetically, all known natural languages employ both front and back vowels; [1] however, in a vertical vowel system, the occurrence of front vs. back vowels is predictable, governed by one or more phonological processes.

Two different diachronic mechanisms may give rise to a vertical vowel system. In some cases, the front-back distinction may simply be lost when vowels are merged. This has occurred in Wichita, in which an old vowel /u/ (preserved in the related language Pawnee) has merged with /i/. However, the Wichita vowel system is not phonetically vertical, as /a/ is realised as open back, /e/ as open-mid front, and /i/ as close to close-mid front; hence, the feature [± back] is relevant to the phonetics of the language, even though it is not a salient phonological distinction. Similarly, the vowel [o] is heard in Wichita utterances, although this vowel is usually the phonetic result of a contraction of sequences of [short vowel + w + short vowel], a phenomenon also noted in other languages with vertical vowel systems.

More striking is a phenomenon whereby one or more phonological features of vowels are lost and reassigned to the consonants at the syllable periphery, leaving all vowels underspecified for frontness, rounding, or both. This has occurred in Arrernte, in which vowel rounding has been lost and consonantal labialisation gained as a result. All members of the Northwest Caucasian family have reassigned both rounding and frontness to the syllable periphery, the former surfacing as consonantal labialisation, and the latter as palatalisation. This has also occurred in Marshallese. Some argue that the short vowels of Irish have similarly lost their frontness specification, forming a rudimentary vertical system. However, almost all Irish consonants appear in palatalised and non-palatalised forms, so the loss of frontness specification is viewed as a consequence, rather than a cause, of consonant palatalisation. Furthermore, the loss of frontness specification in Irish is limited to the short vowels of the language; the long vowels of Irish retain a front-back distinction. Marshallese also has front-back distinction for its long vowels, but these are phonemically sequences of /CVGVC/ where /G/ is a semiconsonant; [2] for example, rooj "rose" is broadly /rˠɛwɛtʲ/, but more narrowly [rˠɔːtʲ].

Zero-dimensional vowel systems, with one phonemic vowel only, have been postulated for Nuxálk,[ citation needed ] Kabardian,[ citation needed ] and some Abkhaz dialects,[ citation needed ] as well as several Central Chadic languages such as Moloko.[ citation needed ] A phonological analysis with no phonemic vowels at all has been shown to be possible for Mofu-Gudur.[ citation needed ]

Vertical vowel systems been noted for the following languages:

Kazakh, Mongolian and Tundra Nenets [3] have vowel systems resembling a vertical vowel system in that backness is not phonemic; however, they are not one-dimensional. Backness has in Kazakh and Mongolian been reinterpreted as advanced tongue root, while in Tundra Nenets backness is determined according to the palatalization of adjacent consonants. Vowels are otherwise distinguished, in addition to height, by diphthongization and, in Kazakh and Tundra Nenets, rounding.

Vowel prosody system

Complex interaction between a vertical vowel system and vowel harmony, known as a vowel prosody system, appears in many of the Central Chadic languages. One of the best known cases is Margi, but the phenomenon has been documented in more than thirty languages of the group altogether, including all or most languages of five geographically adjacent subgroups:

Further examples of the system of the appear in e.g. Gidar and Podoko.

A typical feature for these languages is that vowel frontness or roundedness cannot be considered a segmental feature but is instead a suprasegmental feature, spanning an entire morpheme or phonological word. All Central Chadic languages allow frontness as a prosody and therefore contrast minimal pairs such as [dam] vs. [dem]; only some allow roundedness as a prosody, and in others, rounded vowels are found only next to labialized velar consonants.

Related Research Articles

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and [b], pronounced with the lips; and [d], pronounced with the front of the tongue; and [g], pronounced with the back of the tongue;, pronounced throughout the vocal tract;, [v], and, pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and, which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Phonetic Alphabet</span> System of phonetic notation

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.

A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.

Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth.

In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the consonants y and w in yes and west, respectively. Written in IPA, y and w are near to the vowels ee and oo in seen and moon, written in IPA. The term glide may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel.

Ubykh, an extinct Northwest Caucasian language, has the largest consonant inventory of all documented languages that do not use clicks, and also has the most disproportional ratio of phonemic consonants to vowels. It has consonants in at least eight, perhaps nine, basic places of articulation and 29 distinct fricatives, 27 sibilants, and 20 uvulars, more than any other documented language. Some Khoisan languages, such as Taa, may have larger consonant inventories due to their extensive use of click consonants, although some analyses view a large proportion of the clicks in these languages as clusters, which would bring them closer into line with the Caucasian languages.

In phonetics, palatalization or palatization is a way of pronouncing a consonant in which part of the tongue is moved close to the hard palate. Consonants pronounced this way are said to be palatalized and are transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet by affixing the letter ⟨ʲ⟩ to the base consonant. Palatalization cannot minimally distinguish words in most dialects of English, but it may do so in languages such as Russian, Japanese, Norwegian (dialects), Võro, Irish and Kashmiri.

In phonetics, vowel roundedness is the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. It is labialization of a vowel. When a rounded vowel is pronounced, the lips form a circular opening, and unrounded vowels are pronounced with the lips relaxed. In most languages, front vowels tend to be unrounded, and back vowels tend to be rounded. However, some languages, such as French, German and Icelandic, distinguish rounded and unrounded front vowels of the same height, and Vietnamese distinguishes rounded and unrounded back vowels of the same height. Alekano has only unrounded vowels. In the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart, rounded vowels are the ones that appear on the right in each pair of vowels. There are also diacritics, U+0339◌̹COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING BELOW and U+031C◌̜COMBINING LEFT HALF RING BELOW, to indicate greater and lesser degrees of rounding, respectively. Thus has less rounding than cardinal, and has more. These diacritics can also be used with unrounded vowels: is more spread than cardinal, and is less spread than cardinal.

A yer is either of two letters in Cyrillic alphabets, ъ and ь. The Glagolitic alphabet used, as respective counterparts, the letters (Ⱏ) and (Ⱐ). They originally represented phonemically the "ultra-short" vowels in Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic, and are collectively known as the yers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marshallese language</span> Micronesian language of the Marshall Islands

Marshallese, also known as Ebon, is a Micronesian language spoken in the Marshall Islands. The language of the Marshallese people, it is spoken by nearly all of the country's population of 59,000, making it the principal language. There are also roughly 27,000 Marshallese citizens residing in the United States, nearly all of whom speak Marshallese, as well as residents in other countries such as Nauru and Kiribati.

English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nenets languages</span> Samoyedic languages spoken in Russia

Nenets is a pair of closely related languages spoken in northern Russia by the Nenets people. They are often treated as being two dialects of the same language, but they are very different and mutual intelligibility is low. The languages are Tundra Nenets, which has a higher number of speakers, spoken by some 30,000 to 40,000 people in an area stretching from the Kanin Peninsula to the Yenisei River, and Forest Nenets, spoken by 1,000 to 1,500 people in the area around the Agan, Pur, Lyamin and Nadym rivers.

In linguistics, assibilation is a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is a form of spirantization and is commonly the final phase of palatalization.

The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) or Finno-Ugric transcription system is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nestor Setälä, a Finnish linguist.

Secondary stress is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word, the stronger degree of stress being called primary. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the secondarily stressed syllable, as before the nun in proˌnunciˈation. Another tradition in English is to assign acute and grave accents for primary and secondary stress, respectively: pronùnciátion.

The most thorough treatment of the Kiowa sound system is by Laurel Watkins in a generative framework. A consideration of prosodic phenomena with acoustic analysis is in Sivertsen (1956). Earlier discussions of phonemics are Trager (1960), Merrifield (1959), Wonderly et al. (1954), and Harrington (1928).

The mid front rounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages.

This article covers the phonological system of South African English (SAE) as spoken primarily by White South Africans. While there is some variation among speakers, SAE typically has a number of features in common with English as it is spoken in southern England, such as non-rhoticity and the TRAP–BATH split.

The phonology of Māori is typical for a Polynesian language, with its phonetic inventory being one of the smallest in the world with considerable variation in realisation. The Māori language retains the Proto-Polynesian syllable structure: (C)V(V ), with no closed syllables. The stress pattern is unpredictable, unlike in many other Polynesian languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ingrian phonology</span>

Ingrian is a nearly extinct Finnic language of Russia. The spoken language remains unstandardised, and as such statements below are about the four known dialects of Ingrian and in particular the two extant dialects.

References

  1. ↑ Kiparsky, Paul (2017). "Formal and empirical issues in phonological typology". In Hyman, Larry M.; Plank, Frans (eds.). Phonological Typology. De Gruyter.
  2. ↑ Bender, Byron W.; Capelle, Alfred; Pagotto, Louise (2016). Marshallese Reference Grammar. University of Hawaiʻi Press. p. 34. ISBN   978-0-8248-5993-0. In some languages, such sounds are called semivowels or glides, but in Marshallese they are called semiconsonants because they behave more like consonants than like vowels.
  3. ↑ Salminen, Tapani (1997). Tundra Nenets inflection. Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne. Vol. 227. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura. pp. 36–37. ISBN   952-5150-02-X.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.