Tenseness is a term used in phonology to describe a particular vowel quality that is phonemically contrastive in many languages, including English. It has also occasionally been used to describe contrasts in consonants. Unlike most distinctive features, the feature [tense] can be interpreted only relatively, that is, in a language like English that contrasts [i] (e.g. beat) and [ɪ] (e.g. bit), the former can be described as a tense vowel while the latter is a lax vowel. Another example is Vietnamese, where the letters ă and â represent lax vowels, and the letters a and ơ the corresponding tense vowels. But in a language like Spanish, where there is no contrast, the vowel [i] cannot be meaningfully described as either tense or lax. Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-18, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Jump to: navigation, search In oral language, a phoneme is the theoretical basic unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes; that is, changing a phoneme in a word produces either nonsense, or a different word with a different meaning. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Jump to: navigation, search In linguistics, distinctive features are the descriptive quality by which sounds are distinguished from one another. ...

Comparison between tense and lax vowels

In general, tense vowels are more close (and correspondingly have lower first formants) than their lax counterparts. Tense vowels are sometimes claimed to be articulated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels, but this varies, and in some languages it is the lax vowels that are more advanced, or a single language may be inconsistent between front and back or high and mid vowels. The traditional definition, that tense vowels are produced with more "muscular tension" than lax vowels, has not been confirmed by phonetic experiments. Another hypothesis is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels. There are also linguists who believe that there is no phonetic correlation to the tense-lax opposition. A formant is a peak in an acoustic frequency spectrum which results from the resonant frequencies of any acoustical system. ... In phonetics, advanced tongue root, abbreviated ATR or +ATR, or expanded, is the expansion of the pharyngeal cavity by moving the base of the tongue forward, and often lowering the larynx, during the pronunciation of a vowel. ...

In many Germanic languages, such as RP English, standard German, and Dutch, tense vowels are longer in duration than lax vowels; but in other languages, such as Scots, Scottish English, and Icelandic, there is no such correlation. Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family, spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire. ... Received Pronunciation (RP) is a form of pronunciation of the English language, sometimes defined as the educated spoken English of southeastern England. It is the accent of English English most often taught to non-native speakers, and represented in the pronunciation schemes of most British dictionaries. ... German (called Deutsch in German; in German the term germanisch is equivalent to English Germanic), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and is one of the worlds major languages. ... Jump to: navigation, search Scots (or Lallans, meaning Lowlands), often Lowland Scots to distinguish it from the Gaelic of the Highlands, is a language used in Scotland, as well as parts of Northern Ireland and border areas of the Republic of Ireland, where it is known in official circles as... Diagram showing the geographical locations of selected languages and dialects of the British Isles. ...

Since in Germanic languages, lax vowels generally only occur in closed syllables, they are also called checked vowels, whereas the tense vowels are called free vowels as they can occur at the end of a syllable. Jump to: navigation, search This article discusses the unit of speech. ... In English phonetics and phonology, checked vowels are those that must be followed by a consonant in a stressed syllable, while free vowels are those that may stand in a stressed open syllable with no following consonant. ... In English phonetics and phonology, checked vowels are those that must be followed by a consonant in a stressed syllable, while free vowels are those that may stand in a stressed open syllable with no following consonant. ...

Tenseness in consonants

Occasionally, tenseness has been used to distinguish pairs of contrasting consonants in languages. Korean, for example, has a three-way contrast among stops; the three series are often transcribed as [p t c k] - [p^h t^h c^h k^h] - [pʼ tʼ cʼ kʼ]. The contrast between the [p] series and the [pʼ] series is sometimes said to be a function of tenseness: the former are lax and the latter tense. In this case the definition of "tense" would have to include greater glottal tension.

In some dialects of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, contrasts are found between [l, l^j, n, n^j] on the one hand and [ɫˑ, ʎˑ, nˠˑ, ɲˑ] on the other hand. Here again the former set have sometimes been described as lax and the latter set as tense. It is not clear what phonetic characteristics other than greater duration would be associated with tenseness in this case. Jump to: navigation, search Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig; IPA: ) is a member of the Goidelic branch of Celtic languages. ...

Some researchers have argued that the contrast in German traditionally described as voicing ([p t k] vs. [b d g]) is in fact better analyzed as tenseness, since the latter set is voiceless in Southern German. German linguistics call the distinction fortis and lenis rather than tense and lax. Tenseness is especially used to explain stop consonants of the Alemannic German dialects because they have two series of them that are identically voiceless and unaspirated. However, it is debated whether the distinction is really a result of different muscular tension, and not of gemination. Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... Fortis (from Latin fortis strong) and lenis (from Latin lenis weak) are linguistics terms. ... A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... Jump to: navigation, search Alemannic German (Alemannisch) is a group of dialects of the Upper German branch of the Germanic language family. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ...

Bibliography

• Giegerich, Heinz J. English Phonology: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Jessen, Michael. "Phonetics and Phonology of Tense and Lax Obstruents in German." Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998.
• Kim, Nam-Kil. "Korean." In The World's Major Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie, 881-98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Ladefoged, Peter, and Ian Maddieson. The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
• Ó Siadhail, Michael. Modern Irish: Grammatical Structure and Dialectal Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

See also

• List of phonetic topics