The open-mid central unrounded vowel, or low-mid central unrounded vowel,
is a type of
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
sound, used in some
spoken language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
s. The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
that represents this sound is (formerly ). The IPA symbol is not the digit or the
Cyrillic small letter
Ze (з). The symbol is instead a reversed Latinized variant of the lowercase
epsilon,
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. It may also be used with a lowering diacritic , to denote the
near-open central unrounded vowel.
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, 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