IPA number 315 Unicode (hex) U+0264 Kirshenbaum o- | Entity (decimal) ɤ X-SAMPA 7 | |
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The close-mid back unrounded vowel, or high-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Acoustically it is a close-mid back-central unrounded vowel. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ⟨ɤ⟩, called "ram's horns". It is distinct from the symbol for the voiced velar fricative, ⟨ɣ⟩, which has a descender. Despite that, some writings use this symbol for the voiced velar fricative.
The IPA prefers terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. However, a large number of linguists, perhaps a majority, prefer the terms "high" and "low".
Before the 1989 IPA Convention, the symbol for the close-mid back unrounded vowel was ⟨⟩, sometimes called "baby gamma", which has a flat top. The symbol was revised to be ⟨⟩, "ram's horns", with a rounded top, in order to better differentiate it from the Latin gamma ⟨ɣ⟩. Unicode provides only U+0264 ɤ LATIN SMALL LETTER RAMS HORN (HTML ɤ), but in some fonts this character may appear as a "baby gamma" instead.