turkish phonology and morphology (türkçe ses ve b‹ç‹mb‹lg‹s‹)

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Figure 3.4
English Vowels
Turkish Phonology and Morphology (Türkçe Ses ve Biçim Bilgisi)
Turkish distinguishes vowels in terms of height, backness, and rounding. Other
languages utilize other parameters to distinguish vowels. English, for example, has
tense-lax distinction. Tense-lax is a cover term to distinguish pairs of vowels such
as /i/ in the word ‘eat’ and /I/ in the word ‘it’ in English. The need for such a
distinction is illustrated below.
American English has 12 pure vowels. The vowels are presented in Figure 3.4.
i
I
Front
e ´
E
√
Q
cental back
All of the 12 vowels are distinct phonemes. Examples of each of the phonemes
are given below.
/i/ see, key, read, seem, mean, week
/I/ it, win, did, him, river, dinner, six
/e/ say, day, may, rain, table, sail
/E/ red, head, ten, ready, guest, best
/Q/ add, bad, man, answer, fat, apple
/a/ stop, job, Mom, John, college
/√/ fun, run, sun, son, bus, study
/u/ two, room, June, ruler, too, food
/U/ good, foot, wood, stood, cookie, books
/o/ go, show, drove, open, no, pore
/ç/ saw, song, dog, August, law, coffee
/´/ awhile, alive, a bus, arrive
As seen in the chart (Figure 3.4), there are two vowels in 4 of the boxes. In the
Turkish vowel system, when there are two vowels in a box they are distinguished
in terms of rounding. But in English, that is not the case as illustrated below.
height backness rounding
/i/ high front unrounded
/I/ high front unrounded
/e/ mid front unrounded
/E/ mid front unrounded
a
height
As can bee seen in the above examples /i/ and /I/ cannot be distinguished by
these three descriptors. Therefore another descriptor is necessary for English
vowels. For English tense /lax distinction is used to distinguish such pairs. Tense/
lax is a cover term for English which does not have a phonetic basis. Tenseness is
said to affect
U
ç
u
o
mid
low