lunes, 28 de febrero de 2011

Spanish And English

1. Phonemic and phonological differences between Spanish and English

There are also some differences between the two languages that may interfere with English pronunciation (phonemic differences) and with decoding or spelling (phonological differences).

Perhaps the greatest difference between English and Spanish is that Spanish has only five vowel sounds while English has more than 14, depending on regional dialects. This is the reason Spanish speakers have difficulty differentiating between vowel phonemes in words like seat and sit. Both phonemes are pronounced differently from the Spanish sí (yes), which is pronounced somewhere between those two English phonemes. These differences also affect students' spelling.
Here are some other examples of possible interference from Spanish:

Here are a few differences between Spanish and English:

- The consonants: v, ll, h, j, r, rr, z, ñ, x

- Combinations in Spanish that are pronounced differently: que, qui, güe, güi. For example: the u is not pronounced unless it is written as ü; therefore, students may not be sure how to pronounce words like queen, quiet, or quick

- Quotation marks vs. dashes: "Come here," he said. –Ven aquí–le dijo.


Spanish does not have the following sounds (listed by category):

- Vowel diagraphs: ou, ow, eigh, au, aw, oo

- Consonant digraphs: sh, th, wh, ph

- Consonant blends: sl, sm, sts, scr, spr, str

- Initial sounds: kn, qu, wr, sk

- Final sounds: ck, ng, gh

- Endings: -ed (pronounced /d/ or /t/ or /ded/ or /ted/)

- Endings: -s (pronounced /s/ or /z/ or /ez/ or /es/)

- Endings without a vowel: -ps, -ts

- Suffixes/prefixes: un-, over-, under-, -ly, -ness, -ful, -est

- Contractions: don't, isn't, weren't, etc.




The Relationship between Phonetics and Phonology

1. Phonetics. Relation to Phonology

Phonetics deals with the production of speech sounds by humans, often without prior knowledge of the language being spoken. Phonology is about patterns of sounds, especially different patterns of sounds in different languages, or within each language, different patterns of sounds in different positions in words etc
In contrast to phonetics, phonology is the study of how sounds and gestures pattern in and across languages, relating such concerns with other levels and aspects of language. Phonetics deals with the articulatory and acoustic properties of speech sounds, how they are produced, and how they are perceived. As part of this, phoneticians may concern themselves with the physical properties of meaningful sound contrasts or the social meaning encoded in the speech signal (e.g. gender,sexuality, ethnicity, etc.). However, a substantial portion of research in phonetics is not concerned with the meaningful elements in the speech signal.While it is widely agreed that phonology is grounded in phonetics, phonology is a distinct branch of linguistics, concerned with sounds and gestures as abstract units (e.g., features, phonemes, mora, syllables, etc.) and their conditioned variation (via, e.g., allophonic rules, constraints, or derivational rules).Phonology relates to phonetics via the set of distinctive features, which map the abstract representations of speech units to articulatory gestures, acoustic signals, and/or perceptual representations.


2. The Relationship between Phonetics and Phonology

Most phonetic work falls into the sub-field of articulatory phonetics (the study of the human vocal tract, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and how to make and describe language sounds), but with recent advances in computers and the availability of good phonetics software, there has been a recent boom in acoustic research (the physical properties of sounds-wave forms, pitch, intensity, spectrograms).

Phonology cares about the entire sound system for a given language. The goal is to formulate a model/theory which explains not only the sound patterns found in a particular language, but the patterns found in all languages.

Examples of questions which are interesting to phonologists are: How do sounds change due to the sounds around them? (For example, why does the plural of cat end with an 's'-sound, the plural of dog end with a 'z'-sound, and the plural of dish end in something sounding like 'iz'?) How do sounds combine in a particular language? (For example, English allows 't' and 'b' to be followed by 'l' - rattle, rabble, atlas, ablative - so why then does 'blick' sound like a possible word in English when 'tlick' does not?)

The classic generative model of linguistics provides a straightforward view of the relationship between phonetics and phonology. According to
Chomsky and Halle, phonological representations, seen as classificatory feature bundles, are converted by phonological rules into a phonetic representation in which features take on scalar values. Phonetic and sociolinguistic studies, however, have shown for some time that this view is simplistic: (a) repetitions of the same utterance by the same speaker can differ substantially from one another; (b) speakers of the same linguistic variety show systematic differences in the realization of
the same category; (c) different realizations of the “same” category (say, segments transcribed as [s]) are also found cross-linguistically.
In phonetics, intra- and inter-speaker variation within the same linguistic variety has been typically viewed as noise to be stripped from the signal. On the other hand, cross-linguistic differences have often been said to have a functional basis. For example, Cohn showed that vowel nasalization is much more extensive in English, in which it is not distinctive, than in French, which contrasts oral and nasal vowels.

Phonology

Phonology studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is aboutthe physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonologydescribes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound, they are phonemes (sound of a language as represented or imagined without reference to its position in a word or phrase). A phoneme could be thought of as a family of related phones, called allophones. An allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. A phone is a sound that has a definite shape as a sound wave, while a phoneme is a basic group of sounds that can distinguish words (i.e. changing one phoneme in a word can produce another word); speakers of a particular
language perceive a phoneme as a single distinctive sound in that language.



A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding so-called minimal pairs: pairs of words that differ only in one phone, and have a distinct meaning. They are used to demonstrate that two phones constitute two separate phonemes in the language. As an example for English vowels, the pair "let" + "lit" proves that the phones [ɛ] (in let) and [ɪ] (in lit) do in fact represent distinct phonemes /ɛ/ and /ɪ/. An example for English consonants is the minimal pair of "pat" + "bat". In fact, this pair differs in voice onset time of the initial consonant as the configuration of the mouth is same for [p] and [b]. The exact number of phonemes in English depends on the speaker and the method of determining phoneme vs. allophone, but estimates typically range from 40 to 45.

In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.


1. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.The IPA is used by foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, singers, actors, lexicographers, artificial language enthusiasts (conlangers), and translators.




The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are distinctive in spoken language: phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables.
IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two basic types, letters and diacritics.

IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two basic types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ‹ t › may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter, [t], or with a letter plus diacritics, [t̺ʰ], depending on how precise one wishes to be.[4] Occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of 2008, there are 107 letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosodic marks in the IPA.

1.1 Letterforms
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet.[note 4] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. However, there are letters that are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ‹ʔ›, has the form of a "gelded" question mark, and derives originally from an apostrophe.[note 5] In fact, there are a few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ‹ʕ›, which, though modified to fit the Latin alphabet, were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ﻉ‎, `ain).

The IPA letters for click consonants were ‹ʘ›, ‹ʇ›, ‹ʗ›, and ‹ʖ›, all of which were derived either from existing IPA letters, or from Latin and Greek letters. However, except for ‹ʘ›, none of these letters was widely used among Khoisanists or Bantuists, and as a result they were replaced by the more widespread symbols ‹ʘ›, ‹ǀ›, ‹ǃ›, ‹ǂ›, and ‹ǁ› at the IPA Kiel Convention in 1989. Although the IPA diacritics are fully featural, there is little systemicity in the letter forms. A retroflex articulation is consistently indicated with a right-swinging tail, as in ‹ɖ ʂ ɳ›, and implosion by a top hook, ‹ɓ ɗ ɠ›, but other pseudo-featural elements are due to haphazard derivation and coincidence. For example, all nasal consonants but uvular ‹ɴ› are based on the form ‹n›: ‹m ɱ n ɲ ɳ ŋ›. However, the similarity between ‹m› and ‹n› is a historical accident, ‹ɲ› and ‹ŋ› are derived from ligatures of gn and ng, and ‹ɱ› is an ad hoc imitation of ‹ŋ›. In none of these is the form consistent with other letters that share these places of articulation.

1.2 Symbols and sounds
The International Phonetic Alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet, using as few non-Latin forms as possible.[5] The Association created the IPA so that the sound values of most consonant letters taken from the Latin alphabet would correspond to "international usage".[5] Hence, the letters ‹b›, ‹d›, ‹f›, (hard) ‹ɡ›, (non-silent) ‹h›, (unaspirated) ‹k›, ‹l›, ‹m›, ‹n›, (unaspirated) ‹p›, (voiceless) ‹s›, (unaspirated) ‹t›, ‹v›, ‹w›, and ‹z› have the values used in English; and the vowel letters from the Latin alphabet (‹a›, ‹e›, ‹i›, ‹o›, ‹u›) correspond to the sound values of Latin: [i] is like the vowel in machine, [u] is as in rule, etc. Other letters may differ from English, but are used with these values in other European languages, such as ‹j›, ‹r›, and ‹y›.

This inventory was extended by using capital or cursive forms, diacritics, and rotation. There are also several derived or taken from the Greek alphabet, though the sound values may differ. For example, ‹ʋ› is a vowel in Greek, but an only indirectly related consonant in the IPA. Three of these (‹β›, ‹θ› and ‹χ›) are used unmodified in form; for others (including ‹ɣ›, ‹ɛ›, ‹ɸ›, and ‹ʋ›) subtly different glyph shapes have been devised, which may be encoded in Unicode separately from their "parent" letters.

The sound values of modified Latin letters can often be derived from those of the original letters. For example, letters with a rightward-facing hook at the bottom represent retroflex consonants; and small capital letters usually represent uvular consonants. Apart from the fact that certain kinds of modification to the shape of a letter generally correspond to certain kinds of modification to the sound represented, there is no way to deduce the sound represented by a symbol from its shape (unlike, for example, in Visible Speech).

Beyond the letters themselves, there are a variety of secondary symbols which aid in transcription. Diacritic marks can be combined with IPA letters to transcribe modified phonetic values or secondary articulations. There are also special symbols for suprasegmental features such as stress and tone that are often employed.

1.3 Brackets and phonemes
There are two principal types of brackets used to set off IPA transcriptions:
- /square brackets/ are used for phonetic details of the pronunciation, possibly including details that may not be used for distinguishing words in the language being transcribed, but which the author nonetheless wishes to document.
- /slashes/ are used to mark off phonemes, all of which are distinctive in the language, without any extraneous detail.
For example, while the /p/ sounds of pin and spin are pronounced slightly differently in English (and this difference would be meaningful in some languages), the difference is not meaningful in English. Thus phonemically the words are /pɪn/ and /spɪn/, with the same /p/ phoneme. However, to capture the difference between them (the allophones of /p/), they can be transcribed phonetically as [pʰɪn] and [spɪn].

1.4 Phonetic Transcription
Although the IPA offers over a hundred and sixty symbols for transcribing speech, only a relatively small subset of these will be used to transcribe any one language. It is possible to transcribe speech with various levels of precision. A precise phonetic transcription, in which sounds are described in a great deal of detail, is known as a narrow transcription. A coarser transcription which ignores some of this detail is called a broad transcription. Both are relative terms, and both are generally enclosed in square brackets.
For example, the English word little may be transcribed broadly using the IPA as [ˈlɪtəl], and this broad (imprecise) transcription is an accurate (approximately correct) description of many pronunciations. A more narrow transcription may focus on individual or dialectical details: [ˈɫɪɾɫ] in General American, [ˈlɪʔo] in Cockney, or [ˈɫɪːɫ] in Southern US English.



Phonetic transcriptions of the word international in two English dialects. The square brackets indicate that the differences between these dialects are not necessarily sufficient to distinguish different words in English


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ergntBoeAHM


1.5 Consonants


Non-pulmonic consonants
Clicks ʘ ǀ ǃ ǂ ǁ
Implosives ɓ ɗ ʄ ɠ ʛ
Ejectives pʼ tʼ kʼ qʼ sʼ
tsʼ tɬʼ tʃʼ kxʼ kʼ

Affricates p̪f ts dz tʃ dʒ tɕ dʑ ʈʂ ɖʐ
tɬ dɮ cç ɟʝ

Co-articulated consonants
Fricatives ɕ ʑ ɧ
Approximants ʍ w ɥ ɫ
Stops k͡p ɡ͡b ŋ͡m




Pulmonic consonants

A pulmonic consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis (the space between the vocal cords) or oral cavity (the mouth) and either simultaneously or subsequently letting out air from the lungs. Pulmonic consonants make up the majority of consonants in the IPA, as well as in human language. All consonants in the English language fall into this category.

The pulmonic consonant table, which includes most consonants, is arranged in rows that designate manner of articulation, meaning how the consonant is produced, and columns that designate place of articulation, meaning where in the vocal tract the consonant is produced. The main chart includes only consonants with a single place of articulation.

Co-articulated consonants
Co-articulated consonants are sounds that involve two simultaneous places of articulation (are pronounced using two parts of the vocal tract). In English, the [w] in "went" is a coarticulated consonant, because it is pronounced by rounding the lips and raising the back of the tongue. Other languages, such as French and Swedish, have different coarticulated consonants.

Affricates and double articulated consonants
Affricates and doubly articulated stops are represented by two letters joined by a tie bar, either above or below the letters. The six most common affricates are optionally represented by ligatures, though this is no longer official IPA usage,[1] because a great number of ligatures would be required to represent all affricates this way. Alternatively, a superscript notation for a consonant release is sometimes used to transcribe affricates, for example tˢ for t͡s, paralleling kˣ ~ k͡x. The letters for the palatal plosives c and ɟ, are often used as a convenience for t͡ʃ and d͡ʒ or similar affricates, even in official IPA publications, so they must be interpreted with care.




Vowels
The IPA defines a vowel as a sound which occurs at a syllable center. Below is a chart depicting the vowels of the IPA. The IPA maps the vowels according to the position of the tongue.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlSeYt6PN6s&feature=related


The vertical axis of the chart is mapped by vowel height. Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, [ɑ] (said as the "a" in "palm") is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. However, [i] (said as the vowel in "meet") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.

In a similar fashion, the horizontal axis of the chart is determined by vowel backness. Vowels with the tongue moved towards the front of the mouth (such as [ɛ], the vowel in "met") are to the left in the chart, while those in which it is moved to the back (such as [ʌ], the vowel in "but") are placed to the right in the chart.




Tongue positions of cardinal front vowels with highest point indicated. The position of the highest point is used to determine vowel height and backness




Tongue positions of cardinal front vowels with highest point indicated. The position of the highest point is used to determine vowel height and backness









Tongue positions for vowel sounds

domingo, 27 de febrero de 2011

Phonetics

1. Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds (phones):their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status.






1.1History
Phonetics was studied as early as 500 BC in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification. The Ancient Greeks are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with Alexander Melville Bell, whose Visible Speech (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds.

The study of phonetics grew quickly in the late 19th century partly due to the invention of phonograph, which allowed the speech signal to be recorded. Phoneticians were able to replay the speech signal several times and apply acoustic filters to the signal. In doing so, one was able to more carefully deduce the acoustic nature of the speech signal.


1.2 Subfields
Phonetics as a research discipline has three main branches:

- Articulatory phonetics is concerned with the articulation of speech: The position, shape, and movement of articulators or speech organs, such as the lips, tongue, and vocal folds.
- Acoustic phonetics is concerned with acoustics of speech: The spectro-temporal properties of the sound waves produced by speech, such as their frequency, amplitude, and harmonic structure.
- Auditory phonetics is concerned with speech perception: the perception, categorization, and recognition of speech sounds and the role of the auditory system and the brain in the same.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPEBlP2cbIQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrpeIMolA70

1.3 Transcription
Phonetic transcription is a system for transcribing sounds that occur in spoken language or signed language. The most widely known system of phonetic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), uses a one-to-one mapping between phones and written symbols. The standardized nature of the International Phonetic Alphabet enables its users to transcribe accurately and consistently the phones of different languages, dialects, and idiolects. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a useful tool not only for the study of phonetics, but also for language teaching, professional acting, and speech pathology.



1.4 Articulatory phonetics
Subfield of phonetics. Articulatory phoneticians are interested in how the different structures of the vocal tract, called the articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc.), interact to create the specific sounds.


Larynx, anterolateral view








Larynx, superior view Larynx, lateral view



1.4.1 Principal organs of articulation:



1 . Manner of articulation :

Describes how the tongue, lips, and other speech organs involved in making a sound make contact. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants. For any place of articulation, there may be several manners. Articulation may be divided into two large classes: obstruents and sonorants.

a) Obstruent: consonant sound formed by obstructing outward airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract. There is a distinctive opposition between voiceless (sound in which the vocal cords do not vibrate) and voiced (the vocal cords vibrate) types.



Obstruents are subdivided into stops, fricatives, and affricates.
Obstruents are prototypically voiceless, though voiced obstruents are common.
Plosives, or stops, where there is complete occlusion (blockage) of both the oral and nasal cavities of the vocal tract, and therefore no air flow. Examples include English /p t k/ (voiceless) and /b d g/ (voiced). If the consonant is voiced, the voicing is the only sound made during occlusion; if it is voiceless, a plosive is completely silent. What we hear as a /p/ or /k/ is
the effect that the onset of the occlusion has on the preceding vowel, and well as the release burst and its effect on the following vowel. The shape and position of the tongue (the place of articulation) determine the resonant cavity that gives different plosives their characteristic sounds. All languages have plosives.
Fricatives,
sometimes called spirants, where there is continuous frication (turbulent and noisy airflow) at the place of articulation. Examples include English /f, s/ (voiceless), /v, z/ (voiced), etc. Most languages have fricatives, though many have only an /s/.
Sibilants are a type of fricative where the airflow is guided by a groove in the tongue toward the teeth, creating a high-pitched and very distinctive sound. These are by far the most common fricatives. Fricatives at coronal (front of tongue) places of articulation are usually, though not always, sibilants. English sibilants include /s/ and /z/.
Affricates, which begins like a plosive, but this releases into a fricative rather than having a separate release of its own. They behave as if they were intermediate between stops and fricatives.The English letters "ch" and "j" represent affricates.
b) Sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. Essentially this means that a sound is sonorant if it can be produced continuously at the same pitch. For example vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like /m/ and /l/. Other consonants, like /d/ or /k/, cannot be produced continuously and so are non-sonorant. They are typically voiced. In addition to vowels, sounds that are considered sonorant include approximants, nasal consonants, taps, and trills. Approximants, where there is very little obstruction. Approximants could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and typical consonants. One use of the word semivowel is a type of approximant, pronounced like a vowel but with the tongue closer to the roof of the mouth, so that there is slight turbulence. In English, /w/ is the semivowel equivalent of the vowel /u/ (well), and /j/ (spelled "y") is the semivowel equivalent of the vowel /i/ in this usage (yes). Other descriptions use semivowel for vowellike sounds that are not syllabic, but do not have the increased structure of approximants. These are found as elements in diphthongs. Because they are so similar phonetically, the concepts of semivowel and approximant are
often used interchangeably.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF6QVxJoiKo


To illustrate, the English word wow may be transcribed as [waʊ̯] (or abbreviated to [waʊ]). Even though both the [w] and the [ʊ̯] are similar to the vowel [u], the transcription [waʊ̯] indicates that the initial segment is considered to be a consonant by the transcriber, while the final segment is considered to form a diphthong with the preceding vowel. The approximant
[w] is more constricted and therefore more consonant-like than the semivowel [ʊ̯].

Lateral approximants, (lateral), are a type of approximant pronounced with the side of the tongue. English /l/ is a lateral (lip).
Together with the rhotics, which have similar behavior in many languages, these form a class of consonant called liquids. Nasal stops, usually shortened to nasals, where there is complete occlusionof the oral cavity, and the air passes instead through the nose. The shapeand position of the tongue determine the resonant cavity that givesdifferent nasal stops their characteristic sounds. Examples include English /m, n/. Nearly all languages have nasals.

Flap, often called a tap, is a momentary closure of the oral cavity. The "tt" of "utter" and the "dd" of "udder" are pronounced as a flap in North American English. Trill, in which the articulator (usually the tip of the tongue) is held in place and the airstream causes it to vibrate. The double "r" of Spanish "carro" is a trill. Trills and flaps, where there are one or more brief occlusions, constitute a class of consonant called rhotics.


2. Places of articulation :
Point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between a moving articulator (typically some part of the tongue) and a passive articulator (typically some part of the roof of the mouth). Along with the manner of articulation this gives the consonant its distinctive
sound.

a) Labials: consonants articulated either with both lips (bilabial articulation) or with the lower lip and the upper teeth (labiodental articulation). English [m] is a bilabial nasal sonorant, [b] and [p] are bilabial stops (plosives), [v] and [f] are labiodental fricatives.

English bilabial consonants identified by the IPA are: Example

IPA Description Language Orthography IPA Meaning

m bilabial nasal English man [mæn] man

p voiceless bilabial plosive English spin [spɪn] spin

b voiced bilabial plosive English bed [bɛd] bed


English labiodental consonants identified by the IPA are: Example

IPA Description Language Orthography IPA Meaning

labiodental nasal English symphony [sɪɱfəni] symphony

f voiceless labiodental fricative English fan [fæn] fan

v voiced labiodental fricative English van [væn] van


b) Coronal:
articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. They can be divided into apical (using the tongue tip), laminal (using the tongue blade), domed (with the tongue bunched up), or sub-apical (with the tongue curled back).
Coronal places of articulation include the dental consonants, the alveolar consonants, the postalveolar consonants (palato-alveolars).
Alveolar: articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior
alveolar ridge. English alveolar consonants identified by the IPA are:
Dental: articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth.
Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near ortouching the back of the alveolar ridge.



c) Dorsal:
are articulated with the mid body of the tongue (the dorsum).
Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth).
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate.
Glottal consonants are with the glottis.


Places of articulation:



Vowels
Sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis. 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. However, some languages also allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the syllabic l in English: table [teɪ.bl̩] (the stroke under the l indicates that it is syllabic).
English has 14–20 vowels (including diphthongs) depending on dialect. There is not necessarily a direct one-to-one correspondence between the vowel sounds of a language and the vowel letters. Many languages that use a form of the Latin alphabet have more vowel sounds than can be represented by the standard set of five vowel letters. In the case of English, the five
primary vowel letters can represent a variety of vowel sounds, while the
letter Y can represent both vowels and a consonant.
The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "speaking", because in most languages words and thus speech are not possible without vowels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdlu4p9AZY4


The articulatory features that distinguish different vowels in a language are said to determine the vowel's quality. Daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the common features height (vertical dimension), backness (horizontal dimension) and
roundedness (lip position). There are however more possible features of vowel quality, such as the velum position (nasality) and type of vocal fold vibration (phonation).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdtNMum3epQ


Height.
Refers to the vertical position of the tongue relative to either the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw. In high vowels, such as [i] and [u], the tongue is positioned high in the mouth, whereas in low vowels, such as [a], the tongue is positioned low in the mouth. Sometimes the terms open and close are used as synonyms for low and high for describing vowels.

Backness

Refers to the horizontal tongue position during the articulation of a vowel relative to the back of the mouth. In front vowels, such as [i], the tongue is positioned forward in the mouth, whereas in back vowels, such as [u], the tongue is positioned towards the back of the mouth.

Roundedness

Refers to whether the lips are rounded or not. In most languages, roundedness is a reinforcing feature of mid to high back vowels, and not distinctive. Usually the higher a back vowel, the more intense the rounding.

Tenseness is a particular vowel quality that is phonemically contrastive in many languages, including English. Unlike most distinctive features, the feature [tense] can be interpreted only relatively, that is, in a language like English that contrasts [i:] (e.g. beat) and [ɪ] (e.g. bit), the former can be described as a tense vowel while the latter is a lax vowel.

Comparison between tense and lax vowels
In general, tense vowels are more close than their lax counterparts. Tense vowels are sometimes claimed to be articulated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels, but this varies, The traditional definition, that tense vowels are produced with more "muscular tension" than lax vowels, has not been confirmed by phonetic experiments. Another hypothesis is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels. There are also linguists who believe that there is no phonetic correlation to the tense-lax opposition.

Vowel phonemes of English.
A. English vowels or monophthongs. (Vowel sound whose quality doesn't
change over the duration of the vowel)
a) There are four front vowel phonemes: [æ] [e] [i:] [i]
1. [i:] is a close, long, tense, unrunded vowel. It has three basic positions:
word-initial: east; word-medial: clean and word-final: sea. Spellings: e
(economy) or ee (feet) or ea (each). Other possible spellings are ie
(friend), ei (seizing), i (machine). Exceptionally: ey (key), ay (quay), eo
(people).
2. [ɪ] is a short, lax, unrounded vowel. Spelling: i (ill) or y (party).
Exceptional examples: minute /minit/; private /praivit/; women /wimin/.
3. [e] is a short, lax, unrounded vowel. It is distributed in initial position
(end) or medial position (tell). Spelling: e (fell), ea (head). Exceptional
examples: a (many, any, Thames).
4. [æ] is a short, lax, unrounded vowel. It is distributed in syllable initial
(ant), medial (cat) and final position (rapid). It is usually spelt a (fact) and
exceptionally ai (plait).
b) There are five back vowel phonemes: [a:] [ɔ] [ɔ:] [u] [u:]

1. [a:] is a long, low, tense, unrounded vowel. Spelling: a + silent r (jar,
carpet); a + silent l (palm, calm); a + f/ff (after, staff); a + ss (class);
as/an + another consonant (past, demand); a + th in word-final position
(bath). Exceptionally aunt, sergeant, father, Berkeley.
2. [ɔ] is short, lax, open and slightly rounded. Only distributed in initial and
medial position (on, pot). Spelling: o . Other spellings are possible: ou, a, au
(cough, want, laurel).
3. [ɔ:] is a long, tense, more rounded than [ɒ]. It is usually spelt aw/au
(drawn, taught); or if it occurs in final position (for) or is followed by either a consonant or a silent e (sore, port); exceptionally oo (door); oa
(board); ough (ought); a (water); ou (course).
4. [u] is a short, lax, rounded vowel. It never occurs in initial position an
exceptionally in final position ( do, who). Spelling: u (pull, put, push); w + o
(wolf); oo + k/t/d/l/nasal (look, foot, wood, wool, room); ou in verbal forms
(could).
5. [u:] is the highest back vowel of English. It is a long, tense, rounded
vowel. Spelling: u (rule); oo (root); ou through, soup); oe (shoe, canoe); ui
(fruit, suit).
c) There are three central vowels: [ɜ:] [ʌ] [ə]
1. [ʌ] is a central, half-open, short, lax, unrounded vowel. It is distributed in
word-initial and medial position (utter, subtle). Spelling: u (but); o (come);
ou (southern); exceptionally oo ( blood and flood) and oe (does).
2. [ə] is the commonest English vowel. It is central, mid, lax and unrounded.
The schwa occurs in all basic positions but only in unstressed syllables
(rather). The vowel can be the reduced form of any simple unstressed
vowel (fatal, fatality, fatalism).
3. [ɜ:] is a central, mid, long, tense central vowel. It only occurs in tressed
syllables. Spelling: ir, ur, er, yr in final position or followed by a consonant
or ear + consonant (bird, burn, fern, myrtle, learn). Other spellings: our
(journey) and exceptionally o (colonel).


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXIcrPgpJ4E



Phonetic symbols for English