Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any
point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the
vocal tract. A vowel is also understood to be syllabic: an equivalent open but non-syllabic sound is called
a semivowel.
In all
languages, vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and (in languages that have them) coda. However, some languages also allow other sounds to
form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the syllabic l in the English word table
[ˈteɪ.bl̩] (the stroke
under the l indicates that it
is syllabic; the dot separates syllables), or the r in Serbo-Croatian vrt [vr̩t] "garden".
There is a
conflict between the phonetic definition of "vowel" (a sound produced
with no constriction in the vocal tract) and the phonological definition (a
sound that forms the peak of a syllable).[1] The approximants [j] and [w] illustrate this conflict: both are
produced without much of a constriction in the vocal tract (so phonetically
they seem to be vowel-like), but they occur on the edge of syllables, such as
at the beginning of the English words "yet" and "wet"
(which suggests that phonologically they are consonants). The American linguist
Kenneth Pike suggested the terms 'vocoid' for a phonetic vowel and
"vowel" for a phonological vowel,[2] so using this terminology, [j] and [w] are classified
as vocoids but not vowels.
The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning
"speaking", because[citation needed] in most languages words and thus
speech are not possible without vowels. In English, the word vowel is commonly used to mean both
vowel sounds and the written symbols that represent them.
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar