the.com/vowel
The open mouth's MVP, the sound that escapes when nothing gets in its way.
means A speech sound made with an open vocal tract so the breath flows freely (in English, typically a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y), forming the core of a syllable.
from From Latin vocalis, 'vocal, sounding,' from vox, 'voice' — literally 'the sounding letter.' It reached English through Old French vouel before settling into 'vowel,' and vox itself is a deep relative of words like 'voice' and 'vocation.'
- airflow
- Made with zero blockage in the vocal tract
- hawaiian flex
- Some words run five vowels in a row
- sometimes y
- The alphabet's most famous part-timer
- ancient gap
- Early Hebrew and Arabic wrote almost none
- singing fuel
- Held notes ride on vowels, not consonants
for instance
great vowel shift — linguistic change in english pronunciation roughly 1400-1700 that transformed how vowels sounded
hawaiian okina — glottal stop considered a vowel in hawaiian language, represented by ʻ symbol