All about Vowel. This is another Text 2 Audio transformation using Flite. Below is the transcript for the recording: In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as an English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A vowel is also understood to be syllabic: an equivalent open but non-syllabic sound is called a semivowel. In all oral languages, vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and coda. However, some languages also allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the syllabic l in the English word table , or the r in Serbo-Croatian vrt "garden". There is a conflict between the phonetic definition of "vowel" and the phonological definition . The approximants and [w illustrate this conflict: both are produced without much of a constriction in the vocal tract , but they occur on the edge of syllables, such as at the beginning of the English words "yet" and "wet" . The American linguist Kenneth Pike suggested the terms "vocoid" for a phonetic vowel and "vowel" for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology, and are classified as vocoids but not vowels. However, Maddieson and Emmory demonstrated from a range of languages that semivowels are produced with a narrower constriction of the vocal tract than vowels, and so may be considered consonants on that basis. The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" . In English, the word vowel is commonly used to mean both vowel sounds and the written symbols that represent them.

• published: 02 Oct 2013
• views: 0