| 释义 |
▪ I. vowel, n.|ˈvaʊəl|
Also 4 wowel (6 -ell), 5–7 vowell(e.
[a. OF. vouel (also vouyel, voy-, voieul) masc.:—L. vōcāl-em or vōcāle, masc. and neut. acc. sing. of vōcālis vocal a. The later OF. voielle, mod.F. voyelle, Prov. and Sp. vocal, Pg. vogal, It. vocale are fem., after the L. n. vōcālis.]
1. a. A sound produced by the vibrations of the vocal cords; a letter or character representing such a sound (as a, e, i, etc.).
‘A vowel may be defined as voice (voiced breath) modified by some definite configuration of the super-glottal passages, but without audible friction (which would make it into a consonant)’ (Sweet Primer of Phonetics, ed. 2, §32).
c1308Sat. Kildare iii. in E.E.P. (1862) 153 Þis uers is imakid wel of consonans and wowel. c1450Mankind 490 in Macro Plays 18 Remembre my brokyn hede in þe worschyppe of þe v. vowellys. 1483Cath. Angl. 404/1 A vowelle, vocalis. 1530Palsgr. Introd. p. xv, They forme certayne of theyr vowelles in theyr brest. Ibid. p. xvii, Any of the fyrst thre vowels A, E or O. 1551T. Wilson Logike G vij b, In these wordes there be foure vowels to be considered, and marked. 1587Golding De Mornay xxiv. (1592) 368 They drive their clauses to fall alike, they eschew nycely the meeting together of vowels. 1612Brinsley Lud. Lit. 15 More specially to bee carefull, for the right pronouncing the fiue vowels. 1669Holder Elem. Speech 29 In all Vowels the passage of the mouth is open and free, without any appulse of an Organ of Speech to another. 1687Dryden Hind & P. ii. 386 The sense is intricate, 'tis only clear What vowels and what consonants are there. 1751Harris Hermes Wks. (1841) 209 It is the variety of configurations in these openings only, which gives birth and origin to the several vowels. 1769Cook Voy. round World i. xix. (1773) 228 Their language is soft and melodious; it abounds with vowels, and we easily learnt to pronounce it. 1816Keats Epist. to C. C. Clarke 56 Spenserian vowels that elope with ease, And float along like birds o'er summer seas. 1867Ellis E.E. Pronunc. i. iii. 61 Salesbury does not always discriminate the long vowel, though..he occasionally..doubles the consonant sign to imply the brevity of the preceding vowel.
b. transf. and fig.
1576Fleming Panopl. Epist. 175 This manner of profession is no Vowell in your Alphabet, is no flower in your Garden. 1577B. Googe Heresbach's Husb. (1586) 11 Marcus Varro divideth his husbandry necessaries into three parts: vowels, where he puts his owne servants and such as he hireth; halfe vowels, where his working cattell be; and mutes. 1657Trapp Comm. Job xxxii. 7 We use to say, That at meetings young men should be Mutes, and old men Vowels.
†2. A vocable; a word. Obs.
1578T. N. tr. Conq. West Ind. (1596) 201 The Temple is called Teucalli, that is to say, Gods house, Teutl signifieth God, and Calli is a house, a vowel very fitte, if that house had bene of the true God. 1614T. White Martyrd. St. George C j, Nor of his Creed one vowell to recant. 1648Gage West Ind. 47 Mexico is as much as to say a spring or fountain, according to the property of the vowell or speech.
3. attrib. and Comb., as vowel-alternation, vowel-articulation, vowel-change, vowel-consonant, vowel-ending, vowel-length, vowel-letter, vowel-loveliness, vowel-notation, vowel-phoneme, vowel-rhyme, vowel-sequence, vowel-shade, vowel-sign, vowel-sound, vowel-space, vowel-symbol, vowel-system, vowel triangle, etc.; vowel-initial adj.; vowel colour, the precise timbre and quality of a vowel sound; so vowel colouring; vowel diagram, a diagram showing relative degrees of closeness or openness, front-raising or back-raising of the tongue, in the articulation of individual vowels; vowel-glide [cf. glide n. 4], the gliding movement from one vowel component to another, as in a diphthong; also, = glide n. 4; vowel gradation = ablaut; vowel harmony, a feature of the Finno-Ugric, Turkish, and other languages, whereby successive syllables of words are limited to a particular class of vowel; vowel height, the degree to which the tongue is raised or lowered in the pronunciation of a particular vowel; vowel-laxing, the enunciation of a vowel with the speech organs relaxed (cf. lax a. 5 c); vowel-point, a sign used to indicate a vowel in certain alphabets (esp. the Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic); also as v., to supply with points in place of vowels; cf. point n.1 3 b and v.1 3 c; vowel-quality, the identifying acoustic characteristic of a vowel; vowel-quantity, the duration of time needed for the pronunciation of a vowel; vowel shift, a phonetic change of vowel or vowels, spec. applied to a series of changes between medieval and modern English affecting the long vowels of the standard language; freq. in phr. great vowel shift; cf. shift n. 14 d.
1951W. K. Matthews Languages U.S.S.R. iv. 57 The already noticed Manchu *vowel-alternation to express sex-gender may be paralleled by Evenki examples.
1937J. R. Firth Tongues of Men 42 Instead of referring to the *vowel-articulations, we refer to the resulting sounds.
1848Bagster's Analyt. Heb. Concordance 57 The *Vowel⁓changes of Nouns. 1871Kennedy Public Sch. Lat. Gram. 9 Syllables may be strengthened by vowel-change.
1948M. Joos Acoustic Phonetics ii. 59 It seems that a listener can hear a difference of *vowel color [in the [ɛ] of hotel spoken by three American speakers] equivalent to a distance of 1 semitone on the formant chart. 1978Amer. Speech LIII. 291 Different arrays of formants constitute different vowel colors.
1939F. M. Ford Let. May (1965) 321 The mere sequence of the *vowel coloring of that phrase will give you acute pleasure. 1979Archivum Linguisticum 1978 IX. 156 Pajares notes that the loss of laryngeal and the lengthening (and in some cases vowel coloring) of the preceding vowel can also be considered a monophthongization.
1669Holder Elem. Speech 141 This is eminently seen in the *Vowel Consonants, Y, W. 1881W. R. Smith Old Test. in Jew. Ch. ii. Notes 393 This use of the vowel-consonants is found even on the stone of Mesha. 1960Amer. Speech XXXV. 227 Vowel-consonant syllables [are] less intelligible than consonant-vowel syllables. 1977P. Strevens New Orientations Teaching of Eng. xii. 151 Permissible consonant-clusters and vowel-consonant sequences are similar.
1932D. Jones Outl. Eng. Phonetics (ed. 3) viii. 36 (caption) Fig. 23 Diagram illustrating the Tongue-positions of the eight primary Cardinal Vowels. Fig. 24. A more accurate form of *Vowel Diagram. 1976C. Barber Early Mod. Eng. vi. 299 The long and short pure vowels in StE in the middle of our period are shown on the vowel diagrams in Figure 3 and Figure 4.
1844Proc. Philol. Soc. I. 261 Nouns of the n declension often took the nunnation in the nominative in place of the usual *vowel-ending.
[1856Vocal glide: see glide n. 4.] 1878H. Sweet Handbk. Phonetics 63 (heading) Initial and Final *Vowel-Glides. 1932D. Jones Outl. Eng. Phonetics (ed. 3) 25 Such vowel-glides are often called semi-vowels. 1962A. C. Gimson Introd. Pronunc. Eng. ii. vii. 121 Diphthongal Vowel Glides. The sequences of vocalic elements included under the term ‘diphthong’ are those which form a glide within one syllable. 1973J. D. O'Connor Phonetics vii. 220 A diphthong..is phonetically a vowel glide or a sequence of two vowel segments which functions as a single phoneme. Ibid. 221 Other vowel glides such as /eu, øu, iu, ɔu/ which also occur [in Danish], must be interpreted as vowel +/v/ since they do not occur freely in the same sorts of context as the remaining vowels and diphthongs.
1887W. W. Skeat Princ. Eng. Etym. x. 158 To discover the original Teutonic *vowel-gradation..we must compare with one another the oldest known forms of the verbs in the various Teutonic languages. 1938Amer. Speech XIII. 209 The term ‘vowel-change’ is evidently a new attempt (like ‘vowel gradation’..) to avoid the German word Ablaut. 1973A. H. Sommerstein Sound Pattern Anc. Greek ii. 70 As is well known, vowel gradation, or ablaut, was an important feature of proto-Indo-European morphology.
[1893J. Clark Man. Linguistics vi. 151 The Ural-Altaic languages..which are dominated by a law of vocalic harmony that, to speak generally, requires that one class of vowels..should obtain in the various syllables of a word.] 1900H. Sweet Hist. Lang. vii. 122 In Finnish, the vowels are divided, from the point of view of *vowel-harmony, into the three classes hard, soft and neutral. 1972Language XLVIII. 365 The nature of the rules of vowel harmony is and has been the subject of some discussion... The traditional view is as follows: the vowel harmony rule in Turkish specifies that, for any vowel, the distinctive feature in question is determined by the value of the previous vowel.
1977Archivum Linguisticum VIII. 71 This is obscured by a distinctive feature system which uses a binary classification of [{pm}high] and [{pm}low] to define *vowel height.
1949E. A. Nida Morphology (ed. 2) ii. 16 Note that h- occurs before the consonant-initial stem k′ab and k before the *vowel-initial stem akan. 1978Language LIV. 23 Before apparently vowel-initial nouns like héros and honte, we find no elision.
1977Stud. in Eng. Lit.: Eng. Number (Tokyo) 155 Rule (24) succeeds in formally expressing a linguistically significant generalization underlying various *vowel-laxing processes. 1980English World-Wide I. 250 The linguistic variables analyzed in the remaining six chapters are: (i) vowel laxing in monosyllabic personal pronouns and a number of non-pronominal forms.
1932D. Jones Outl. Eng. Phonetics (ed. 3) 237 *Vowel-length depends to a considerable extent on the rhythm of the sentence. 1977P. Strevens New Orientations Teaching of Eng. xii. 151 The relation between stress and vowel-length is of the same general type.
1846, etc. *Vowel-letter [see mater lectionis]. 1933L. Bloomfield Language 292 We use the Latin vowel-letters not only in entirely new values..but in inconsistent ways.
1855tr. Lepsius' Standard Alphabet 28 The Indian grammarians, who express the nasalisation..by a *vowel-like sign, namely, by placing a dot over the letter. 1879Sweet in Trans. Philol. Soc. 456 + iv, The unaccented (ə) is dropped in rapid speech between consonants which combine easily, especially between points and vowellikes. 1888― Hist. Eng. Sounds 9 Those ‘vowellike’ or ‘liquid’ voiced consonants which are unaccompanied by buzz are often also syllabic.
1910D. H. Lawrence Let. 26 Oct. (1962) I. 67 One can get good Swinburnian consonant music by taking thought, but never Shakespearean *vowel-loveliness.
1860Marsh Lect. Eng. Lang. (1862) 484 In accordance with his general system of *vowel-notation.
1935G. K. Zipf Psycho-Biol. of Lang. (1936) 316 All the short *vowel-phonemes. 1964C. Barber Present-Day Eng. iii. 38 There is no pair of English vowel-phonemes which is distinguished solely by length. 1977D. Fry Homo Loquens ii. 13 In English..about twenty are the vowel phonemes, exemplified by the word group beat, bit, bet, bat, etc.
1764Phil. Trans. LIV. 419 Nor is it to be wondered at, that, before the invention of the *vowel-points, the quiescent letters should have sometimes been suppressed. 1843Proc. Philol. Soc. I. 138 In fact, with a different notation, nearly all the labour of the vowel-points might be saved. 1845Browning Lett. (1899) I. 16, I could not well vowel-point my commonplace letters and syllables with a masoretic other sound and sense. 1893W. Forbes-Mitchell Remin. Gt. Mutiny 275 The Oordoo in the circular is printed in the Persian character without the vowel-points.
1844R. Garnett in Proc. Philol. Soc. I. 265 The *vowel-prefix to certain past tenses (Sanscr. a, Gr. ε).
1920W. Perrett Peetickay 23 A notation of *vowel-quality, derived from the ‘organic’ positions of the tongue, lips, etc., already exists in Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech. 1965W. S. Allen Vox Latina ii. 52 The Latin vowel-quality is vouched for by Italian borsa.
1933L. Bloomfield Language 294 For the writers, the gh was now a mere silent graph, indicative only of *vowel-quantity. 1977Archivum Linguisticum VIII. 93 According to the Introduction, it has two aims: firstly to examine the various factors involved in the vowel-quantity changes that took place between Middle High German and New High German.
1620W. Folkingham Brachigraphy iv, In like sort and position are Letters placed apart in *Vowel Regions to imply interceding Vowels.
1838Guest Hist. Eng. Rhythms I. 316 The *vowel-rhime, or..the assonant rhime, was common in the Romance of Oc. 1873–4G. M. Hopkins Jrnls. & Papers (1959) 287 Alliteration is initial half-rhyme, ‘shothending’ is final half-rhyme, assonance is vowel rhyme. 1961A. Clarke Later Poems 89 In simple patterns, the tonic word at the end of the line is supported by a vowel-rhyme in the middle of the next line.
1939F. M. Ford Let. May (1965) 321 The mere *vowel sequences of certain passages will be sufficient to call back to you all the associations of your youth. 1965Language XLI. 482 It gives a desirable economy of phonemes, which the vowel-sequence solution does not.
1955J. R. R. Tolkien Return of King 409 The language that they [sc. the Ents] had made was..slow, sonorous..; formed of a multiplicity of *vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity.
1909O. Jespersen Mod. Eng. Gram. I. viii. 231 The great *vowel-shift consists in a general raising of all long vowels. 1933― Essentials Eng. Gram. iii. 34 The greatest revolution that has taken place in the phonetic system of English is the vowel-shift. 1936Essays & Studies XXI. 10 The great vowel-shift of the late Middle Ages was followed by numerous other changes. 1964C. Barber Present-Day Eng. iii. 51 The great vowel-shift which took place between Middle English and Modern English. 1977Canad. Jrnl. Linguistics 1976 XXI. ii. 177 After the application of the degemination rule and the vowel shift rule one obtains [eksīd].
1849Jrnl. Amer. Oriental Soc. I. 523 We begin with the *Vowel-signs, of which there are three in the Persian cuneiform alphabet. 1871Kennedy Public Sch. Lat. Gram. 9 §12 E and O, introduced into most other languages as intermediate vowel-signs, exist in Sanscrit only as diphthongs arising from ai, au.
1795Monthly Rev. Aug. 410 All the simple sounds, *vowel and consonantal. 1822–7Good Study Med. (1829) I. 544 The glottis..forms all the vocal or vowel sounds. 1875Whitney Life Lang. iv. 56 The strange names we give to our vowel⁓sounds.
1965W. S. Allen Vox Latina ii. 54 There would have been more *vowel-space to accommodate the new sound. 1979Amer. Speech 1978 LIII. 294 Suppose the available ‘vowel space’ for a community's language were constrained to the relatively small triangular region bounded by the calculated Neanderthal approximations to the three reference vowels.
1932D. Jones Outl. Eng. Phonetics (ed. 3) 5 The naming of *vowel-symbols presents some difficulty. 1957R. W. Zandvoort Handbk. Eng. Gram. 337 Words in silent e drop it before endings beginning with a vowel-symbol.
1855tr. Lepsius' Standard Alphabet 11 He contended successfully against the English *vowel-system. 1875Whitney Life Lang. iv. 55 The consistency of our vowel-system.
1918D. Jones Outl. Eng. Phonetics vi. 16 If we examine the tongue positions of the typical sounds of these five classes [of vowels] we find that the highest points of the tongue lie roughly on the sides of a triangle... This triangle is known as the ‘*Vowel Triangle’.
▪ II. vowel, v.|ˈvaʊəl|
[f. prec.]
†1.
a. intr. To utter the vowels in singing.
b. trans. To sing with vowel-articulation. Obs. (Cf. vowelling vbl. n. 1 a.)
1597Morley Introd. Mus. 179 They ought to studie howe to vowell and sing cleane. 1646Mayne Serm. Unity (1647) 32 As if they [i.e. the Psalms]..had been tuned through his own loud Cymball, or had more softly been sung and vowell'd to his Harpe.
2. trans. To convert into a vowel; to vocalize.
1611Cotgr., Vocalizé, vowelled, made a vowell.
3. To supply with vowels or vowel-points.
1681H. More Exp. Dan. Pref. 7 They did not know how to point them or vowel them. 1880Encycl. Brit. XI. 797/1 Some syllabics never take a vowel except for an unusual form,—the root and the ordinary derivatives never being vowelled.
†4. slang. To pay (a creditor) with an IOU.
1709Steele Tatler No. 12 ⁋3 Do not talk to me, I am Voweled by the Count, and cursedly out of humour. 1760Foote Minor i. i, They will vowel you, from Father to Son to the twentieth generation. 1796Grose's Dict. Vulgar T. (ed. 3) s.v., A gamester who does not immediately pay his losings, is said to vowel the winner, by repeating the vowels I.O.U. or perhaps from giving his note for the money according to the Irish form.
▪ III. vowel
southern dial. var. foul a., fowl n. |
