Mid-centralized vowel
Encyclopedia : M : MI : MID : Mid-centralized vowel
| [Edit] - 2× | Front | N.-front | Central | N.-back | Back | |
| Close |
| |||||
| Near-close | ||||||
| Close-mid | ||||||
| Mid | ||||||
| Open-mid | ||||||
| Near-open | ||||||
| Open | ||||||
represents a rounded vowel.
A mid-centralized vowel is a vowel closer to the center of the vowel space than some point of reference. That is, it is closer to schwa [ə]. The diacritic used to mark this in the International Phonetic Alphabet is the over-cross, [ ̽].
In most languages, vowels become mid-centralized when spoken quickly, and in some, such as English and Russian, many vowels are also mid-centralized when unstressed.
Even when fully articulated, the vowels of a language may be on the schwa side of a cardinal IPA vowel. One example of this is Lisbon Portuguese, where unstressed e is a near-close near-back unrounded vowel. That is, it lies between the close back unrounded vowel [ɯ] and schwa, and may be written [ɯ̽], as in pegar [pɯ̽ˈgaɾ] "to hold".
See also
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.