Vowels are the sounds that make up words in English and other languages. The vowels are usually pronounced with the mouth open and not constricted, which gives them a more musical sound than consonants. Vowel sounds are important because they play a role in spelling and grammar, as well as the pronunciation of other words. Vowel sounds can also be manipulated to produce long or short vowel sounds, such as the e in hat and beat. Vowels can even be used to create new sounds, like the y in duty or hope.
In writing systems that use the Latin alphabet, the letters A, E, I, O, U and Y are considered vowels. However, this does not necessarily mean that these letters represent vowels in all languages that use the Latin alphabet, or even consistently within a language. Furthermore, some of these letters (such as h and r) can sometimes be used to represent sounds that are not vowels, particularly when they come at the beginning of a word.
There are two kinds of vowels in the สระผสมภาษาอังกฤษ language: short and long. A long vowel is pronounced as its name would sound, and a short vowel is pronounced with less openness and roundedness. Short and long vowels tend to be grouped together into groups, called syllables. Children often learn to distinguish the sounds of these syllables in the alphabet song, and they will later learn that some letters can be used to make more than one sound. This is called a vowel digraph. Children will also learn that some letters can be both consonants and vowels, such as th, ch and sh, which are found in words such as bath, chip and mash.
The pronunciation of the individual vowels is influenced by a number of factors, including lip position and rounding, which can be seen in a graph that plots the frequency of the first formant of each vowel (F1 or voicing) against its second formant (F2 or articulation). Rounded vowels typically have lower F2 frequencies than unrounded vowels, so they are shown as a darker shade on a vowel chart.
Other influences can include stress and tone, but these are not always associated with specific segments in a syllable. Vowels can also be compared to each other using a chart that shows the vowels in order of increasing frontness or centrality, and the corresponding phonetic characteristics. In this way, we can see that [i] is more front than [u], while the vowels in the middle are a bit closer than the back vowels. The chart is based on the IPA chart for vowels and uses a different colour scheme to identify the back, central and front vowels. This explains why rounded vowels such as [i] and [ue] have a lighter shade of pink, while the back, central and front unrounded vowels are shown in a darker shade of red.
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