Concept
Vowel
Overview
A vowel is a 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, loudness, and length. They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress. The nucleus, or "center", of a syllable typically consists of a vowel sound (though this is not always the case).
The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice).
In English, the word vowel is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them: ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩, and sometimes ⟨y⟩, and ⟨w⟩.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Vowel is discussed.
A word is lengthened when its own vowel is exchanged for a longer one, or when a syllable is inserted. A word is contracted when some part of it is removed.
Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
In which Characters or ways of Writing a Vowel is always join'd with a Consonant into one compound Character to make it effable. And then the single Strokes may be taken for single ineffable Letters as are the Consonants, and the composition of two or three (of which one at least may be a Vowel) will make Syllables. Of this kind, there are not so many in the whole _Chinese_ Character, but that it will be easie…
Royal Society, Miscellanea Curiosa, Vol. 3
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
In Greek, Latin, and Italian, when a vowel is omitted at the end of a word (denoted by an apostrophe), put a space before the word which immediately follows. Hair spaces to be placed between lower-case contractions, as in e.g., i.e., q.v. Indentation of first lines of paragraphs should be one em for full measures in 8vo and smaller books.
Oxford University Press, Rules for compositors and readers at the University Press, Oxford
states what it is; opens on it; names the idea
Indivisible sounds are uttered by the brutes also, but no one of these is a Letter in our sense of the term. These elementary sounds are either vowels, semivowels, or mutes. A vowel is a Letter having an audible sound without the addition of another Letter. A semivowel, one having an audible sound by the addition of another Letter; e.g. S and R.
Aristotle, Aristotle on the art of poetry
states what it is; names the idea
On the relative strength of this or that one or more of these Helmholtz has shown that the instrument's peculiar voice depends. The several vowel-sounds in the human voice also depend on the predominance of diverse upper harmonics accompanying the note on which the vowel is sung. When the two tuning-forks of the last paragraph are sounded together the new form of vibration has the same _period_ as the lower-pitched…
William James, Psychology
states what it is; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Vowel
Related ideas
- Estonian language
- French language
- Cantonese
- German language
- Hungarian language
- Hawaiian language
- Japanese language
- Latin
- Latin alphabet
- American English
- Mandarin Chinese
- Norwegian language
- Arabic alphabet
- Polish language
- Phoneme
- Phonology
- Writing system
- Portuguese language
- Romanian language
- Swedish language
- Spanish language
- Serbo-Croatian
- Slovak language
- Swahili
Opposing perspectives
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