The open-mid front rounded vowel, or low-mid front rounded vowel,
is a type of
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...
sound, used in some
spoken language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
s. The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is . The symbol
Å“ is a lowercase
ligature of the letters
o and
e. The sound , a
small capital
In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technicall ...
version of the ligature, is used for a distinct vowel sound: the
open front rounded vowel
The (near) open front rounded vowel, or (near) low front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that has not been confirmed to be phonemic in any spoken language. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound i ...
.
Open-mid front compressed vowel
The open-mid front compressed vowel is typically transcribed in IPA simply as , which is the convention used in this article. There is no dedicated
IPA diacritic
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
for compression. However, the compression of the lips can be shown by the letter as (simultaneous and labial compression) or ( modified with labial compression). The spread-lip diacritic may also be used with a rounded vowel letter as an ''ad hoc'' symbol, but 'spread' technically means unrounded.
Features
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