These concern vowel length, vowel nasalization, and diphthongs. There are a number of types of cases which pose this problem, of which only three principal ones will be discussed rather briefly here. By considering further sets of words with other consonants, the full set of English vowels can be established (which will vary depending on the variety of English being considered).Īs with consonants, for many languages it is quite straightforward to decide how many vowels there are, but in other cases there are some difficult questions to resolve, particularly where there is a question of whether a given syllable center should be recognized as consisting of one or of two (or even more) parts. The English words seat, sit, sate, set, sat, sot, soot, suit show that English has at least 8 different vowel sounds. The set of vowels used must therefore be established in the same kind of way as was discussed for consonants, in this case by comparing sets of words in which only the vowel sound differs. As this example shows, an established spelling system often involves a very indirect connection between the letters used and the vowel sounds of the language. Vowels are the kinds of sounds that typically occur as the essential centers of syllables in many languages the shortest possible word consists of just one vowel, as in the French word eau ‘water’, pronounced as the single vowel sound /o/. It complements Chapter 1 on consonant inventories, although in this chapter the number of elements concerned is counted in a slightly different way. This chapter discusses the number of vowel contrasts in the inventory of sounds in languages.
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