Articulatory classification of English vowels

Articulatory classification of English vowels

Vowels

• unlike consonants are produced with no obstruction to the stream of air, so on the perception level their integral characteristic is naturally tone, not noise.

• The following 20 vowel phonemes are distinguished in BBC English:
• [i:, a:, ɔ:, u:, з:, ı, e, æ, ɔ, υ, ʌ, ə; eı, aı, ɔı, аυ, ou, eǝ, υə, ıə].

• A minimum vowel system of a language is likely to take the form of triangle
• ı u
• a

The most important characteristic of these vowels

• acoustically stable
• entirely different from one another both articulatorily and acoustically.
• → they form boundaries of "phonetic field of vowels" in a modern man's life.

Vowel quality

• a bundle of definite articulatory characteristics:
• size,
• volume,
• shape of the mouth resonator,
• relative stability of the tongue,
• the position of the lips,
• physical duration of the segment,
• the force of articulation,
• the degree of tenseness of speech organs

D. Jones

• The first linguist who tried to describe and classify vowels for all languages.
• He devised the system of 8 Cardinal Vowels.
• The basis of the system is physiological.

Cardinal vowels

• No. 1 → the position of the front part of the tongue raised as closed as possible to the palate
• No. 5 → the gradual lowering of the tongue to the back lowest position
• No. 4 → the lowest front position of the tongue
• No. 8 → the upper back limit for the tongue position

• The tongue positions between these points were X-rayed and the equidistant points for No.2, 3, 6, 7 were found.
• The IPA symbols (International Phonetic Alphabet) for the 8 Cardinal Vowels are:
• 1 -i, 2 - e, 3 - ε, 4 - a, 5 - a:, 6 - ɔ, 7 - o, 8 - u.