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In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. [1] Examples of semivowels in English are y and w in yes and west, respectively.
Examples include English /w/ and /r/. In some languages, such as Spanish, there are sounds that seem to fall between fricative and approximant. One use of the word semivowel, sometimes called a glide, is a type of approximant, pronounced like a vowel but with the tongue closer to the roof of the mouth, so that there is slight turbulence.
For this reason, the IPA symbols for labialization and palatalization were for a time placed under the primary letter (e.g. k̫ for [kʷ] and ƫ for [tʲ]), and a number of phoneticians still prefer such unambiguous usage, with kʷ and tʲ used specifically for off-glides, despite the official policy of the IPA.
The glides in the examples can be analyzed as the result of a glide formation process that turns an underlying high vowel into a glide when followed by another vowel: /nie/ → [nje]. This process is usually blocked after a complex onset of the form obstruent + liquid (a stop or a fricative followed by /l/ or /ʁ/ ).
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is j̃ , that is, a j with a tilde. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j~, and in the Americanist phonetic notation it is ỹ . The nasal palatal approximant is sometimes called a nasal yod; [j̃] and [w̃] may be called nasal glides.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is j . The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is j , and in the Americanist phonetic notation it is y . Because the English name of the letter J , jay , starts with [dʒ] ( voiced postalveolar affricate ), the approximant is sometimes instead called yod (jod), as in the ...
The Phonetic Symbol Guide is a book by Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw that explains the histories and uses of the symbols of various phonetic transcription conventions. It was published in 1986, with a second edition in 1996, by the University of Chicago Press .
The glides [j] and [w] are also found as the final element in some syllables. These are commonly analyzed as diphthongs rather than vowel-glide sequences. For example, the syllable bai is assigned the underlying representation /pai̯/. (In pinyin, the second element is generally written -i or -u , but /au̯/ is written as -ao .)