The close-mid back unrounded vowel, or high-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is , called "ram's horn." This symbol is distinct from the symbol for the voiced velar fricative, , which has a descender, but some texts use this symbol for the voiced velar fricative.
Before the 1989 IPA Convention, the symbol for the close-mid back unrounded vowel was , sometimes called "baby gamma", which has a flat top; this symbol was in turn derived from and replaced the inverted small capital A, , that represented the sound before the 1928 revision to the IPA. The symbol was again revised to be , "ram's horn", with a rounded top, in order to better differentiate it from the Latin gamma .
Unicode provides , but in some fonts this character may appear as a "baby gamma" instead. The superscript IPA version is . As of Unicode , there exists a capital ram's horn at .
Features
thumb|left|[[Spectrogram of ]]
Occurrence
{| class="wikitable" style="clear: both;"
! colspan="2"|Language !! Word !! IPA!! Meaning !! Notes
|-
| colspan="2" | Aklanon
|
|
| 'thanks'
|
|-
| colspan="2" | Bashkir
| /
|
| 'nine'
|
|-
| colspan="2" |Biak
|
|
|'stand'
|
|-
| colspan="2" |Bulgarian
|/
|
|'elderflower'
|
|-
| Chinese
| Mandarin
| /
|
| 'hungry'
|
|-
| rowspan="4" | English
| Cape Flats
| rowspan="4" | foot
| rowspan="4" |
| rowspan="4" | 'foot'
| Possible realization of ; may be or instead. See South African English phonology
|-
| South African
| Possible realization of ; may be a weakly rounded instead. See South African English phonology
|-
| Geordie
| Usual realization of . See Geordie phonology
|-
| Birmingham and The Black Country
| Corresponds to in most other dialects.
|-
| colspan="2" | Estonian
|
|
| 'ear'
| Can be close-mid central or close back instead, depending on the speaker. See Estonian phonology
|-
| colspan="2" | Gayo
|
|
| 'tiger'
| Close-mid or mid; one of the possible allophones of .
|-
| colspan="2" |Iaai
|
|
| 'banana leaf'
|-
| Irish
| Ulster
|
|
| 'Ulster'
| See Irish phonology
|-
| colspan="2" | Kaingang
|
|
| 'tail'
| Varies between back and central
|-
| Korean
| Gyeongsang dialect
| /
|
| 'there'
| See Korean phonology
|-
| colspan="2" |Marathi
|/
|
|'opinion'
|See Marathi phonology
|-
| Northern Tiwa
| Taos dialect
| align="center" |
|
| 'it was squeezed'
| May be central instead. See Taos phonology
|-
| colspan="2" |Samogitian
|
|
| 'long'
| May be central instead.
|-
| colspan="2" | Scottish Gaelic
|
|
| 'difficult'
| See Scottish Gaelic phonology
|-
| rowspan="3" |Rusyn
|Lemko variety
| rowspan="3" |/
| rowspan="3" |
| rowspan="3" |'times'
| rowspan="3" |Used only in place of etymological praslavic sound *y
|-
|Prešov variety
|-
|Subcarpathian variety
|-
| colspan="2" | Thai
| /thơ̄
|
| 'you'
|
|-
| colspan="2" | Tuvan
| /yt
|
| 'dog'
|
|-
|colspan=2|Yaqay
|
|
| 'frog'
| Uncommon pronunciation of .
|}
See also
- Index of phonetics articles