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Legend:unrounded • rounded |
Amid vowel (or atrue-mid vowel) is any in a class ofvowel sounds used in some spokenlanguages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned approximately midway between anopen vowel and aclose vowel.
Other names for a mid vowel arelowered close-mid vowel andraised open-mid vowel, though the former phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as low asopen-mid; likewise, the latter phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as high asclose-mid.
The only mid vowel with a dedicated symbol in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet is themid central vowel with ambiguous rounding[ə].
The IPA divides the vowel space into thirds, with theclose-mid vowels such as[e] or[o] and theopen-mid vowels such as[ɛ] or[ɔ] equidistant informant space between open[a] or[ɒ] and close[i] or[u]. Thus a true mid front unrounded vowel can be transcribed as either a lowered ⟨e̞⟩ (with alowering diacritic) or as a raised ⟨ɛ̝⟩ (with araising diacritic).[1][2] Typical truly mid vowels are thus:
Few languages contrast all three heights of mid vowel, because it is rare for a language to distinguish more than four heights of true front or back vowels.
TheKensiu language spoken in Malaysia and Thailand is highly unusual in that it phonemically contrasts true-mid vowels with close-mid and open-mid vowels without differences in other parameters such as backness or roundedness.
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