The open-mid central unrounded vowel, or low-mid central unrounded vowel,
is a type of
vowel sound, used in some
spoken languages. The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
that represents this sound is (formerly ). The IPA symbol is not the digit or the
Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
small letter
Ze (з). The symbol is instead a reversed Latinized variant of the lowercase
epsilon
Epsilon (, ; uppercase , lowercase or lunate ; el, έψιλον) is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel or . In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was der ...
,
ɛ. The value was specified only in 1993; until then, it had been transcribed .
The letter may be used with a
raising diacritic , to denote the
mid central unrounded vowel
The mid central vowel (also known as schwa) is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a rotated lowercase letter e.
While the ''Handbook of the I ...
. It may also be used with a lowering diacritic , to denote the
near-open central unrounded vowel
The near-open central vowel, or near-low central vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a rotated lowercase double-barrelled letter a.
...
.
Conversely, , the symbol for the mid central vowel may be used with a lowering diacritic to denote the open-mid central unrounded vowel, although that is more accurately written with an additional unrounding diacritic to explicitly denote the lack of rounding (the canonical value of IPA is undefined for rounding).
Features
Occurrence
See also
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R-colored vowel
In phonetics, an r-colored or rhotic vowel (also called a retroflex vowel, vocalic r, or a rhotacized vowel) is a vowel that is modified in a way that results in a lowering in frequency of the third formant. R-colored vowels can be articulate ...
, a related phoneme in
rhotic dialects of English
Notes
References
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External links
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{{IPA navigation
Open-mid vowels
Central vowels
Unrounded vowels