Talk:Vowel

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[edit] Written vowels in writing systems

I would like to remove the section Vowel#Written vowels in writing systems as it can easily spin out of control. We don't need a list of every language on the planet with an alphabetic writing system and the letters it uses to show vowels. —Angr 18:12, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree. The section's essentially pointless. garik 17:27, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
No one objected in the past month, so I finally got around to being bold and removing it. —Angr 11:19, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] History of vowels

Are there any articles in Wiki that cite about when was the 'first use of vowels in writing' exist? I need help. TY! Ü Zxyggrhyn 13:44, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Did you check History of writing? —Angr 17:27, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unsourced section removed

I'm removing the section on Vowel systems since it has been tagged as unsourced since November. That's bad in any article, but especially bad in a featured article! If anyone can find and cite sources for it, feel free to re-add it. —Angr 16:22, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spoken File

It's clear that the speaker in the audio version of this page is not a native speaker (Italian in the file's info). I have to really pay attention to what he says and it's very, very frustrating to try and decipher what he means when he mispronounces a word. How would I go about making a recording to replace this one? ·:RedAugust 13:23, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Where Y is the vowel

why isn't there anything mentioned about the letter 'y' being a vowel or a sub-vowel? There are some words without conventional vowels. Here: Sky, spy, cry, my, why, shy, rhythm, etc. So can we consider 'y' as a vowel or sub-vowel? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.140.142.50 (talk) 12:36, August 27, 2007 (UTC)

The article says, "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." In the words you mention, y is standing for a vowel sound. In other words, like yellow and youth, it stands for a consonant sound. —Angr/talk 19:15, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

The Letter Y is not considered a vowel AT ALL in the UK, regardless of what semiotic or semantic arguments may be made for it. The status of Y in different English-speaking countries is an interesting issue and I was disappointed that it was not addressed here. The most basic thing to be said about vowels is how many of them there actually are. 143.252.80.100 (talk) 17:48, 28 November 2007 (UTC)Mullone

I don't quite understand what you mean. Are you saying that in UK "gym" is considered as having no vowel sounds? Or no vowel letters? Keith Galveston (talk) 14:39, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New Zealand and Australia have totally different vowels

Australian English and New Zealand English are listed as having the same vowels on this page. Which would have any Australian rolling on the floor with laughter. New Zealand English is considered a joke in Australia due to their seemingly (to an Australian) random swapping of vowel sounds. Carl Kenner 05:45, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

I think the entire "Pronunciation in English" section is dumb and should be removed. —Angr 06:34, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
I was born and raised in a different part of the world, but have lived in both countries. There's certainly a difference (and there are regional differences within both countries too), but the similarities are far greater than the differences.-gadfium 07:26, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Othe Vowels modernly called Consenants

I'm talking about the Vowel sound of H,R, and W. S is even kind of a 'cosenant/vowel." These first three should be in their own catagory of vowels, because they have no consenant sound whatsoever. What do you think? Maybe we should start a real modern movement right here on Wikipedia? Anyways, have a nice day. ------ Bill Mclemore —Preceding unsigned comment added by KillKill822 (talk • contribs) 01:37, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia isn't the place for starting movements, but you're right about H, R, and W. H, although generally classified as a consonant because of how it behaves, is phonetically speaking just a voiceless vowel. R (in English at any rate) and W are approximants with so little constriction they could qualify as semivowels. I think S is just a consonant, though. —Angr If you've written a quality article... 07:28, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation in English

Inaccurate, unclear, unsourced, confusing, OR-prone, and not that important anyhow. AnGr too thinks it should be removed so, absent a timely objection, I'm gonna be bold and take the Del key to it. Jack(Lumber) 16:26, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

I'll second the deletion proposal. The whole thing belongs to a different page in the first place: [English phonolgy] or IPA chart for English. 石川 (talk) 02:03, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Long Vowels

_ _ IMO one inherent difficulty of this topic is that every native speaker has a strong gut knowledge of vowels of the corresponding language, but (at least in English) for most of them little has been done to help them connect the gut knowledge with formal analysis, except in the service of orthography.
_ _ In English, for most native speakers, the main focus of that analytical capability is how to distinguish, in reading and spelling, the words with long and short vowels; this especially appears in the "silent E makes the preceding vowel long" rule or rule-of-thumb. In contrast to that, i think most people will simply say that the a sounds in cat and car are "short", without awareness of how they differ. (In my experience, most Americans use the a of cat in "Hallelujah", and don't really notice what's different when they hear it pronounced with the car-style a. (I consider myself relatively well-informed in using what i think of as the singer's pronunciation, but i'm still ignorant enough to wonder which of those two short a sounds is a broad a, or whether that is something foreign to the mid-western accent Americans usually hear on the national news.)
_ _ Anyway, my point is that the entirety of the article is written at fairly sophisticated level. Has any thot been given to a new section, between the lead and the current "Articulation" section, that would help ease typical readers into the subject? One approach would be a very short section focusing on vowels that are easy to specify in English -- maybe just a couple of sentences, explicitly saying "for example", and a lk to Vowel sounds in English, with a section on each of the major dialects.
_ _ I don't intend to propose anything well thot thru with this note, but maybe to stimulate consideration of the possibility of lowering the barriers to interest in the existing content of the accompanying article.
--Jerzy•t 03:27, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] vocoids

We have, "The American linguist Kenneth Pike suggested the terms 'vocoid' for a phonetic vowel and 'vowel' for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology, [j] and [w] are classified as vocoids but not vowels."

Is the difference really ±stricture vs. ±syllabic? For those who distinguish semivowels from approximants, [j] and [w] should be contoids as well as consonants, correct? And for this usage, the /l/ in English table would count as a vowel and a contoid, but not a consonant. kwami (talk) 06:27, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Deleted comments about languages not distinguishing all V heights or backness. English does. Or was s.t. meant by those claims? kwami (talk) 14:54, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
Most phonological theories don't permit a five-way backness distinction or a seven-way height distinction. Rather, the contrast between, for example, /i/ and /I/ is in tenseness vs. laxness, but otherwise both are [+high] and [–back] (or [+front]). Still, I think we're better off not trying to describe in this article how many levels of backness and height can be distinguished, since that gets us into the realm of theory-specific phonological argumentation instead of just-the-facts-please-ma'am phonetics. —Angr 19:20, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
I think Ladefoged found five height levels in vowels which are distinguished by nothing else in some dialect of Swiss. This article got me thinking, though. If we take English height to not be distinctive because there are other correlates, then it follows that Spanish has no backness distinction, since all five vowels can be specified in terms of height and rounding. That seems rather out of touch with reality. kwami (talk) 19:29, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
Or more likely, no roundness distinction since it's predictable from height and backness (all [+back, -low] vowels are also [+round]). Or look at Irish phonology where most theoretical phonologists have said the short vowels have no backness distinction (a position I used to believe but no longer do). These sorts of assumptions of underspecification are standard in phonological theory. —Angr 19:33, 4 June 2008 (UTC)