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Open mid front unrounded vowel

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IPA number
  
303

Unicode (hex)
  
U+025B

Kirshenbaum
  
E

Entity (decimal)
  
ɛ

X-SAMPA
  
E

Open-mid front unrounded vowel

The open-mid front unrounded vowel, or low-mid front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is a Latinized variant of the Greek lowercase epsilon, ⟨ɛ⟩.

Contents

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".

Features

  • Its vowel height is open-mid, also known as low-mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between an open vowel (a low vowel) and a mid vowel.
  • Its vowel backness is front, which means the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Note that rounded front vowels are often centralized, which means that often they are in fact near-front.
  • It is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.

    • Occurrence

    The vowel transcribed in IPA with ⟨ɛ⟩ in Standard Eastern Norwegian is actually mid.

    References

    Open-mid front unrounded vowel Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA