The close-mid back unrounded vowel, or high-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
sound, used in some spoken
language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
s. Its 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 standard written representation ...
is , called "ram's horn." This symbol is distinct from the symbol for the
voiced velar fricative
The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound that is used in various spoken languages. It is not found in most varieties of Modern English but existed in Old English. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents ...
, , which has a
descender, but some texts use this symbol for the voiced velar fricative.
Before the
1989 IPA Convention, the symbol for the close-mid back unrounded vowel was , sometimes called "baby gamma", which has a flat top; this symbol was in turn derived from and replaced the inverted
small capital A, ⟨
⟩, that represented the sound before the
1928 revision to the IPA. The symbol was ultimately revised to be , "ram's horn", with a rounded top, in order to better differentiate it from the
Latin gamma .
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
provides , but in some fonts this character may appear as a "baby gamma" instead. The
superscript IPA version is .
As of Unicode , there exists a capital ram's horn at .
Features
Occurrence
See also
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Index of phonetics articles
Notes
References
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Close-Mid Back Unrounded Vowel
Close-mid vowels
Back vowels
Unrounded vowels