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The term checked vowel is also used to refer to a short vowel followed by a glottal stop in Mixe, which has a distinction between two kinds of glottalized syllable nuclei: checked ones, with the glottal stop after a short vowel, and nuclei with rearticulated vowels, a long vowel with a glottal stop in the middle.
(The o in the second syllable makes the / ə / sound because it is an unstressed syllable.) Open syllables are syllables in which a vowel appears at the end of the syllable. The vowel will say its long sound. In the word basin, ba is an open syllable and therefore says / b eɪ /. Diphthongs are linguistic elements that fuse two adjacent vowel ...
A coda-less syllable of the form V, CV, CCV, etc. (V = vowel, C = consonant) is called an open syllable or free syllable, while a syllable that has a coda (VC, CVC, CVCC, etc.) is called a closed syllable or checked syllable. They have nothing to do with open and close vowels, but are defined according to the phoneme that ends the syllable: a ...
Later, ME open syllable lengthening caused the short vowel /o/ to be normally changed to /ɔː/ in open syllables. Remaining instances of the short vowel /o/ also tended to become lower. Hence in Late Middle English (around 1400) the following open back vowels were present, distinguished by length: [1] /ɔ/, spelt o , as in dog, god
Later, with the gradual loss of unstressed endings, many such syllables ceased to be open, but the vowel remained long. For example, the word name originally had two syllables, the first being open, so the /a/ was lengthened; later, the final vowel was dropped, leaving a closed syllable with a long vowel.
Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels (in U.S. terminology [1]) in reference to the low position of the tongue. In the context of the phonology of any particular language, a low vowel can be any vowel that is more open than a mid vowel. That is, open-mid vowels, near-open vowels, and open vowels can all be considered low vowels.
Open syllable lengthening affected the stressed syllables of all Germanic languages in their history to some degree. Curiously, it seems to have affected the languages around a similar time, between the 12th and the 16th centuries, during the late Middle Ages .
In some, it is the metathesis of a sequence of liquid consonants followed by a vowel, and in others, it is an insertion of another vowel. In most cases, the effect was to eliminate the syllable-final consonants *l and *r so that the law of open syllables was maintained.