Talk:Close front rounded vowel


 * A discussion on the close front compressed vowel has been moved to that talk page. kwami 07:42, 2005 September 12 (UTC)

Format problems
There are several problems with the formatting and structure of this article.
 * 1) You're not supposed to have two articles in the same wiki
 * 2) You're not supposed to use h1 at all
 * 3) What is a section called "Close front compressed vowel" doing on a page called "Close front rounded vowel"?

It seems to me there are various options for fixing the page:
 * 1) Move the whole page to Close front vowel, assuming that's correct terminology, and move all headers up by one (h1->h2, h2->h3). Then Close front rounded vowel will automatically redirect to Close front vowel; a redirect there for Close front compressed vowel should be added as well.
 * 2) Split Close front compressed vowel off into its own wiki. Remove the level-one header for "Close front rounded vowel" (introductory text should go above the first header).
 * 3) If close front compressed vowels are really a less-important subsidiary topic of close front rounded vowels, then remove level-one header for "close front rounded vowel" and change header for "close front compressed vowel" to level two.
 * 4) Or maybe something else, that people more familiar with the topic than I am might think of.

Linguists should decide which option is best, but it really can't be left as is. An encyclopedia needs a certain stylistic uniformity, at least to the level of font sizes in headers. --Trovatore 16:23, 11 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I'd proposed creating three new articles for the three compressed vowels above, and the response I got was "Nah. A whole darned article just for compression seems over the top when we have so much room left in these." Your first suggestion would work, but would be completely out of line from all the other vowel articles, where there are separate articles for rounded and unrounded (well, except one, which has a similar problem to these three). The third option is no good, at least in my opinion; compression is not a subcategory of rounding phonetically, though it often goes by that name (inrounded vs. outrounded). I'll be happy to create the articles, as I'd offered before; I just didn't want to create a schism. kwami 05:41, 2005 September 12 (UTC)


 * Well, I think it would probably be a good idea to go ahead and create them, then. Very short articles might not be ideal, but they're certainly less problematic than level-one headers inside articles. --Trovatore 06:05, 12 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Done. kwami 07:33, 2005 September 12 (UTC)

Scandinavian vs German French /y/
Question: What about the fact that there is a very significant difference between the Scandinavian y-sound, and the german/french y-sound? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.241.73.108 (talk • contribs)
 * There is? SpectrumDT 20:58, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
 * At least the Norwegian and Swedish y is different, I don't know about the Danish one. The rounding of the lips is different, thus making a different sound. Jonashm 13:48, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Hopefully this will take care of it. AFAIK, the Swedish & Norwegian /y/ is pronounced with pursed lips, and the French & German /y/ with compressed lips. But we really need someone like Peter Isotolo to confirm. kwami (talk) 12:41, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

The sounds I heard here are not the Tukish ü. --144.122.250.74 (talk) 11:49, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Everything is wrong!
Robert Lawrence Trask, A dictionary of phonetics and phonology, 1996:

p.180 "Inner rounding (also horizontal lip-rounding, outrounding) A version of lip-rounding in which the lips are projected forward ('pouted') and the channel between them is formed by their inner surfaces (it is endolabial). Inner rounding is typical of rounded back vowels like [u] and [o]. Cf. outer rounding."

P.252 "Outer rounding (also called vertical lip-rounding, lip compression, inrounding). A type of rounding in which the lips are vertically compressed and the channel is made by the outer surfaces of the lips (it is exolabial). Outer rounding is typical of front rounded vowels like [y]. Cf. inner rounding, and see the remarks there."

Also in Martin John Ball, Fiona E. Gibbon - 2002, Vowel Disorders, p.51. "Catford points out that it is useful to distinguish between different types of lip-rounding: He associates endolabial rounding (lip-pouting, with the rounding formed by the inner surfaces of the lips) with back rounded vowels, and exolabial rounding (lip-pursing, with the rounding formed by the outer surfaces of the lips) with front rounded vowels. These different types of rounding are useful to note in the description of vowels in different accents and languages. Iivonen (1994), for example, describes significant differences in the types of rounding found in Swedish [y:] and [ʉ]."

So it's the other way round as opposed to what the article says: exolabial rounding is normally associated with [y] and endolabial rounding with [u], and not vice versa. How are Swedish and Norwegian special then? Perhaps their [y]s are "even more exolabial"? I don't know. That's probably the bit that confused the Original Researcher who wrote that in the first place. But it was certainly clear, even intuitively, that they are not closer, rounding-wise, to [u] than the German and French [y]s are.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:32, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Any further attempt to explain the peculiarity of Swedish and Norwegian /y/ should be sourced and not based on educated guesses. For the time being there is only a source (the one I gave above) for the general association of exolabial and endolabial with front rounded and back rounded respectively. I could have added that, but I don't think it is so essential.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 17:03, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, I got the terms backwards. I hadn't realized "inner rounding" meant "outrounding" and "outer rounding" meant "inrounding"—no wonder I was confused! (Part of posting here was in the hope that s.o. would confirm or correct it.) But what is special about Swedish is that there is both an exolabial /y/ and an endolabial /y/. Ladefoged & Maddieson confirm the essence of the description; they just didn't use the terms exo & endo. kwami (talk) 17:54, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * OK. Though technically, you still should add a reference for this whole distinction. It's not normal that the sources cited are still the same as before your addition and don't contain the new info. And of course, specifying all /y/s as exolabial (even with a footnote that adds "a grain of salt"), when we don't know it for sure, is redundant.
 * Frankly, my intuition still refuses to accept that the rounding of Swedish /y/ is in any way similar to the usual rounding of back rounded vowels; that may be because my sense of articulatory phonetics ain't that great, or perhaps the /u/ in my native language ain't that endolabial. To me, Swedish /y/ sounds simply less rounded and much closer to /i/ (historically, it has been a front vowel for a much longer time than /ʉ:/ has, it has turned into /i/ in various Nordic languages and dialects, and someone who has studied French before Swedish may still have initial problems in distinguishing between it and /i/). Of course, that is just my problem; I have to admit that the sources on Swedish do ascribe protrusion to Swedish /y:/ vs compression to /ʉ:/ and that the sources on rounding do ascribe protrusion (endolabiality) to back vowels and compression (exolabiality) to front vowels, so your wording in its present form probably isn't too OR-ish.
 * BTW, I'm pretty sure that there is an opinion that Swedish /ʉ:/ is actually a central vowel or something in-between, but I don't have many sources at home to cite; here's one link I found - (scroll down to the vowel chart). Greetings, --91.148.159.4 (talk) 15:04, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

North Frisian hüüs
It seems a bit suspicious that hüüs is supposed to mean hoarse. A few google hits suggest that it's used in the sense of house in tourism, however I'm not sure if I found any specifically North Frisian addresses. --Zahnradzacken (talk) 23:07, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Portuguese?
I think that the (Brazilian?) IP is confusing this sound with ⟨⟩ or ⟨⟩ (near-close near-back unrounded vowel), more commonly transcribed as (as in IPA for Portuguese and Galician), which is sometimes pronounced (ok, this is OR, but I heard both from Portuguese characters acted by real native speakers in telenovelas and from YouTube videos send by Portuguese people) in the place of an unstressed, not only schwi, unstressed  and  (taking the point of view of non-European Portuguese dialects), and which has a historic of making everyone confused. The ⟨⟩ (close front rounded vowel) would seem a weird feature in all other dialects of this language (it is hard for Brazilians to distinguish this sound from when learning French/German). Lguipontes (talk) 08:01, 17 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Supposing it's true, I think we need to consider what the point of these examples is. If we have major languages like French, German, and Mandarin to illustrate [y], why in the world would we want some obscure Azorian Portuguese dialect? Shouldn't we only have such things because we can't attest the sound in any language our readers are likely to have heard of? I can see an exception for obscure English dialects, since this is WP-en. — kwami (talk) 08:22, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Really? I think it's all right to include sourced examples of dialects readers may be unfamiliar with. I'm not sure there is shared agreement on what the point of these examples are.  Once we do come to that understanding, we can pare down the overabundance of them at close front unrounded vowel.  — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]  22:49, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
 * For common sounds, there are potentially thousands of possibilities. I would think the point would be to illustrate them, not to list every language which has them. — kwami (talk) 22:55, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
 * That's a fair point. Though, at this point, the only discrimination we've made for examples has been whether the example is accurate, and whether it's a currently spoken, natural language.  I hesitate to apply other criteria in one place.  — Æµ§œš¹  [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ]  00:07, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Dutch fuut?
I translated the Dutch "fuut" to the English "grebe" -- had no idea what that is, some kind of bird apparently. Can't we please have a more common Dutch word here, e.g. "u" (you), "nu" (now), or "uur" (hour)? I will leave it up to a native Dutch speaker to think of an appropriate example and to make sure it is the correct sound (not sure if e.g. tenseness or length is relevant).
 * In Dutch, "fuut" is quite a normal word. I'll also note that Dutch  is most typically a near-close central rounded vowel, not a close front rounded vowel. --JorisvS (talk) 22:13, 9 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Being a native I can confirm that "fuut" is indeed NOT a normal word, unless you're studying birds. u, nu, uur, vuur, duur, etc. would be better alternatives, as every Dutch person would immediately understand it. I too required a quick Google to understand what a "fuut" is.EratoNysiad (talk) 18:06, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Also as a native, "fuut" is the word for a very common bird, which I've understood since childhood. Words ending in -r are not very good examples, because that tends to affect pronunciation. "Nu" could be an better alternative, though. --JorisvS (talk) 19:27, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Also a native here - changing to "nu" is quite a good idea, as there may be more people not knowing exactly what "fuut" is. Martin sv 85 (talk) 02:28, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

ʉ: vs y: in swedish
On the page for Swedish phonology, they say that y: and ʉ: are different wovels in Swedish (ʉ: corresponding to the sound in du, and y: to the one in dy), but here and at the page for [ʉ] they treat them as the same? Why is this discrepancy?12stefje (talk) 07:14, 26 April 2019 (UTC)