Extra-shortness
Extra-short duration of a speech sound (usually a vowel)
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses a breve ⟨ ˘ ⟩ to indicate a speech sound (usually a vowel) with extra-short duration. That is, [ă] is a very short vowel with the quality of [a]. An example from English is the short schwa of the word police [pə̆ˈliˑs]. This is typical of vowel reduction.
Before the 1989 Kiel Convention, the breve was used for a non-syllabic vowel (that is, part of a diphthong), which is now indicated by an inverted breve placed under the vowel letter, as in eye [aɪ̯]. It is also sometimes used for any flap consonants missing dedicated symbols in the IPA, since a flap is in effect a very brief stop.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Extra-shortness”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- IPA Unicode 0x0306.svg by Kwamikagami, CC BY-SA 4.0
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