As vogais são definidas de duas maneiras. Foneticamente, uma vogal é um som de fala emitido quando as cordas vocais vibram e há pouca ou nenhuma obstrução em qualquer parte do trato vocal – o som sai livre e claro. As vogais também podem ser entendidas como o símbolo (letra) que representa o som; O inglês, por exemplo, usa as seguintes letras para representar vogais: a, e, i, o, u e às vezes y (e, raramente, w). Mas o inglês tem muito mais sons vocálicos do que isso – a maioria dos dialetos do inglês americano, por exemplo, tem de 15 a 16 sons vocálicos ao todo. Por outro lado, com algumas exceções, o espanhol e o russo têm menos sons vocálicos, que geralmente são pronunciados de maneira consistente com a sua grafia.
As vogais têm certas qualidades que as tornam distintas, incluindo comprimento (curto vs. longo), posição da boca e da língua, proximidade com outras vogais, arredondamento dos lábios e nasalização. Então, vamos mergulhar de cabeça nas águas profundas da vogal, respondendo a estas e muito mais: É possível que uma língua não tenha sons vocálicos? O que é um tritongo? Qual idioma tem até 55 sons vocálicos? Existem palavras em inglês sem nenhum som de vogal? O que foi a grande mudança vocálica?
Ubykh – às vezes escrito Ubyx – é uma língua cujo último falante nativo morreu em 1992. A língua faz parte do grupo Língua Caucasiana do Noroeste. O povo Ubykh viveu num lugar chamado Sochi, ao longo da costa oriental do Mar Negro, até que os russos os expulsaram em meados do século XIX.
Tevfik Esenç —o último falante de Ubykh—passou muito tempo com linguistas, atuando na verdade como embaixador cultural e linguístico de uma língua que logo estaria à beira da extinção. Das muitas propriedades fascinantes da língua que foram estudadas, talvez esta seja a que mais se destaca: Ubykh tem apenas dois sons de vogais distintos. Isso se torna ainda mais surpreendente quando se considera que, em contraste, o Ubykh tem um dos maiores inventários consonantais de qualquer língua já observado, com entre 81 e 84 sons consonantais – provavelmente o maior número fora das línguas Khoisan da África Austral (que apresentam cliques ). A proporção desproporcional entre consoante e vogal é a mais alta conhecida na história das línguas do mundo.
Não vale a pena notar que, durante algum tempo, se pensou que a língua Karbadiana do Oriente Médio (uma língua relacionada ao Ubykh) tinha apenas um som de vogal distinto. Alguns foram ainda mais longe, alegando que não havia nenhum som vocálico. Acredita-se agora que tem três vogais, e a maioria dos linguistas concorda que nunca será encontrada nenhuma língua que não contenha quaisquer sons vocálicos. O vídeo acima é de Tevfik Esenç lendo uma história em Ubykh.
Ah, a semivogal . Não é vogal o suficiente para ser uma vogal, mas não é uma consoante o suficiente para ser uma consoante completa, a semivogal vive no limbo. Foneticamente, as semivogais são conhecidas como “aproximadas”, uma distinção que compartilham com alguns outros tipos de sons. O inglês tem duas dessas criaturas: w e y. Faça esses sons e ficará claro por que eles ficam em algum lugar entre vogal e consoante; há uma pequena obstrução, mas os sons emergem da boca de maneira bastante semelhante às vogais. Eles também são conhecidos como “deslizamentos”.
Na ortografia inglesa, y e w são semivogais quando começam palavras ou são a primeira letra após um prefixo, ou (apenas no caso de w) quando seguem uma consoante. Quando terminam as palavras, porém, tornam-se parte do som da vogal anterior. Tomemos a palavra “pata” – w não atua como uma semivogal aqui, mas serve para transformar o “a” em um ditongo; da mesma forma, o “y” para finalizar “pay” faz a mesma coisa (ver item 7).
Se abordarmos esses sons de uma perspectiva fonológica – sendo a fonologia o estudo de como os sons constroem o significado da linguagem – algumas semivogais tornam-se mais complexas na tentativa de classificá-las. As vogais, por definição, são “silábicas”: por si só, são consideradas uma sílaba completa. Y e w, entretanto, não são – eles devem ser anexados a uma vogal para atingir o verdadeiro status de sílaba.
Syllables are a method of organizing and sequencing speech sounds; they’re the way we break down language into spoken parts. Syllables are generally divided into three parts: onset, nucleus, and coda. The nucleus and coda are frequently grouped together and called the rime. In the word “ten,” the “t” is the onset, the “e” is the nucleus, and the “n” is the coda—together, the “e” and “t” comprise the rime. In English, syllables are generally defined as needing a vowel as their nucleus (see #3), though some languages make use of a “ syllabic consonant ” at the nucleus of some syllables. English syllables may have an onset and rime (“cat”), an onset and coda (“me”), a rime only (“it”), or only a nucleus, without any onset or coda (this called a null-onset syllable), including the entire word “owe.” The word has three letters but only one sound, a diphthong that serves as a nucleus, whole syllable, and whole word. Certain languages require an onset, meaning that every syllable must begin with a vowel.
The word “rime” is used to describe the nucleus (with an optional coda) because of its direct ties to poetry. When rhyming words, it is the rime of the syllable that is used to produce the rhyming effect.
A ditongo is when two adjacent vowels come together to form a single vowel with two distinct elements. The vowel sound in the word “fight” is a diphthong, because you start with the vowel sound from “fa” and end up higher up in the mouth making the vowel sound from “feet.” English is full of diphthongs—the sentence “no highway cowboys” contains five distinct diphthongs. Note, however, the distinction between a diphthong and a situation where two vowels each retain their own full effect; the word “neon,” for instance, contains two separate syllables because the “e” and the “o” do not form a diphthong.
Similarly, a tritongo contains three vowel sounds all coming together to form one, as in the British pronunciation of the word “hour.” In this case, the first vowel is serving as the syllable’s nucleus, though there are languages where the second vowel does so and others where the third vowel does. There is some disagreement about whether the middle sound of a word like “layer” should be considered a triphthong, or two distinct vowel sounds (one being a diphthong). One of the reasons that English is tough for foreign learners is the relatively small extent of vowel movement—essentially, we slur our vowels together.
Apofonia , sometimes used synonymously with the term “ em voz alta ,” is a type of vowel gradation, which describes any pair of related words with differing vowel sounds. The first “o” in photograph is long, for example, whereas its counterpart in photography is short. In this pair, however, the grammatical information is intact; both words are nouns, and no inflection has taken place. Apophony, on the other hand, is a form of vowel gradation resulting in a grammatical change. In English, this occurs when the vowel in the middle of a word is altered either to pluralize the word or to change its tense.
A few examples:
– Sing/sang/sung/song. Here, we have 4 different vowels producing 4 distinctly different words, each conveying its own grammatical information (three verb tenses and a noun).
– Mouse/Mice. Phonetically speaking, the only difference here is a shift in the vowel between the “m” and “s” sounds—the result is a pluralization.
Sedang is a language with about 100,000 native speakers; it’s spoken in Laos and Vietnam and is in the Austro-Asiatic language family. More specifically, it belongs to the Bahnaric Language group, a collection of closely related languages known for their wide range of vowels.
What makes Sedang unique amongst the world’s languages is its sheer number of vowel sounds—some linguistic studies place this number as high as 55. The study of distinct vowel sounds is not an exact science, given how subtle the distinctions are between similar sounds—factors such as vowel length and quality contribute to the minor controversy of the “most vowels” crown.
Let’s break that vowel number down. Sedang has 24 pure vowels (meaning single vowels, not attached to another as a diphthong) which can be broken down into 7 vowels that can each be plain, nasalized, or “ rangente “—a vowel quality produced by vibrating one’s vocal folds in such a way that the resulting sound is two octaves above its plain counterpart. Three of these vowels can be both nasal and creaky. Throw in a variable amount of diphthongs, and you’re left with a staggering array of vowel sounds.
As a noteworthy side note, the “creaky” quality of these vowels—also known as “vocal fry”—is possibly showing up in the speech patterns of Mulheres americanas , as well as certain dialects of the American Northwest. Listen to the Sedang language in the above clip.
If you think of the human mouth and its production of vowels as a 3-dimensional grid, what falls right smack in the center? It’s everyone’s favorite upside-down letter: the schwa , represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as “?.” It’s the “uh” sound you hear at the beginning of the word “about,” and phonetically it’s described as a “mid-central” vowel. In English, it’s the most common vowel sound, showing up most commonly in unstressed syllables of words. The schwa can masquerade as any vowel in English:
The “a” in “sofa”
The “e” in photosynthesis
The “i” in “terrible”
The second “o” in “commonly”
The “u” in “medium”
The “y” in “syringe.”
Its use varies significantly based on which dialect of English is being spoken, though it almost always appears in unstressed syllables. In New Zealand English and South African English, however, the high front vowel in the word “sit” has shifted to a position in the mouth very close to the schwa —so close, in fact, that linguists generally denote its sound with a “?.”
In a phenomenon known as “schwa syncope” or simply “schwa deletion,” there is a situation in which schwas tend to be omitted from speech. When a schwa would normally be spoken in a syllable situated mid-word following the stressed syllable, it’s generally left out, as in the cases of cam(e)ra and choc(o)late. Note that schwa syncope does not exist in all English dialects.
Schwas are found in other languages as well, including Albanian, Romanian, French, Korean, and Hindi.
When we talk about words that have no vowels , there are two significantly different avenues for discussion: (1) Words without any vowel letters, and (2) words without any actual vowel sounds. In English, there are only a handful of vowel-less words from a spelling standpoint, and there is (surprise!) disagreement over whether any true English words have no vowel sounds.
Scrabble players, and people with a Welsh background, may recognize the Welsh loanword “crwth”—pronounced “cruth”—as a violin-like instrument. You’ll notice the use of “w” as a vowel here—evident in another Welsh example, cwm (“coom”), a sort of deep valley or gully within a mountain. Interjections like “shhh” and “hmm” have no vowel sounds, but are not always regarded as true words with distinct meanings. Other words like “nth” can stake a claim to be a vowel-less word, whereas words like “myth” don’t count because the “y” stands in for a short “i” sound.
English is usually classified as a language that requires a vowel for every word; by definition, an English syllable must contain a vowel. There are, however, possible exceptions—in certain dialects, for instance, one-syllable words like “bird” and “church” can be heard as having no vowel sound. Say the word “bird”—the “b” goes directly to the “r” potentially without a vowel as a go-between. Where this gets muddy is the concept of a “ vogal rótica ” (represented here by the symbol [?]) which describes a vowel immediately before an “r;” the “r” sound affects the preceding vowel in a significant way. The word “bird” may thus, depending on analysis, be understood as containing an extremely short rhotic vowel.
As with #3 above, there is a difference between a written consonant and a spoken one. The word “eye,” for example, contains a written consonant—y—but is pronounced as one single diphthong. While we have a few such one-syllable words, English is a consonant-heavy language that requires them for nearly all words. Given that syllables do not require a consonant, certain languages have longer no-consonant words as well—unsurprisingly, English only contains a few (including “aa”) and they are all loanwords or scientific terms.
Many Polynesian languages, including Hawaiian, have dozens of such longer words, where the vowel syllables are separated by “ paradas glóticas ” (the brief disruption of airflow in the middle of “uh-oh”). One of these words is a small green fish called the “ae?ea,” which is also the name of the mythical land of Circe. Swahili, Finnish, Rapa Nui, and Portuguese are other languages with longer consonant-less words.
Giving The Great Vowel Shift such cursory treatment is to redefine “short shrift,” and it deserves its own list at the very least. But we’ll summarize it the best we can: The Great Vowel Shift is the name of a massive change in English pronunciation that took place over a period of several hundred years spanning the 15th through 18th centuries. In essence, long vowels began to shift “upwards” in their positioning in the mouth; long vowels already at the top had noplace higher to go, and became diphthongs. This dramatically affected the way English is pronounced today, and is partially responsible for English’s confusing spelling system.
A palavra inglesa moderna “madura” já foi pronunciada “reep”; diga os dois em sucessão e você poderá sentir sua língua mudando para produzir um som de vogal em diferentes partes da boca. A palavra “casa”, que apresenta um ditongo, já foi pronunciada algo como “hoose” – uma vogal longa já na parte superior da boca. Ao todo, cinco vogais longas mudaram para cima e outras duas tornaram-se ditongos. Exceções notáveis à Grande Mudança Vogal ajudam a explicar algumas das muitas inconsistências ortográficas do inglês; tomemos a palavra “amplo”, que se poderia esperar que rimasse com “estrada” e “sapo”. De alguma forma, “amplo” e outras palavras (particularmente aquelas com a grafia “ea”) escaparam da Mudança.
Tal como acontece com todos os eventos linguísticos que não podem ser estudados diretamente (temos muitos textos do período, mas nenhum áudio), linguistas e historiadores discordam sobre as causas da Mudança. As teorias incluem mudanças de sotaque após as grandes migrações pós-Peste Negra; outros olham para as diferenças nas classes sociais.
