Close-mid back unrounded vowel
| Close-mid back unrounded vowel | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ɤ | |||
| IPA number | 315 | ||
| Encoding | |||
| Entity (decimal) | ɤ |
||
| Unicode (hex) | U+0264 | ||
| X-SAMPA | 7 |
||
| Kirshenbaum | o- |
||
| Braille |
 
|
||
|
|||
| Sound | |||
|
|
|||
.svg)
| IPA vowel chart | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| Paired vowels are: unrounded • rounded | |||||||||||||||||||
| This table contains phonetic symbols, which may not display correctly in some browsers. [Help] | |||||||||||||||||||
|
IPA help • IPA key • chart •  chart with audio •
|
|||||||||||||||||||
The close-mid back unrounded vowel, or high-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Acoustically it is a close-mid back-central unrounded vowel. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ⟨ɤ⟩, called "ram's horns". It is distinct from the symbol for the voiced velar fricative, ⟨ɣ⟩, which has a descender. Despite that, some writings use this symbol for the voiced velar fricative.
The IPA prefers terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. However, a large number of linguists, perhaps a majority, prefer the terms "high" and "low".
Before the 1989 IPA Convention, the symbol for the close-mid back unrounded vowel was ⟨
⟩, sometimes called "baby gamma", which has a flat top. The symbol was revised to be ⟨
⟩, "ram's horns", with a rounded top, in order to better differentiate it from the Latin gamma ⟨ɣ⟩.Unicode provides only U+0264 ɤ LATIN SMALL LETTER RAMS HORN (HTML ɤ), but in some fonts this character may appear as a "baby gamma" instead.
...
Wikipedia