Tenseness
From KneeQuickie
Tenseness is a quality of vowels equivalent to how far the lips and tongue have to move to produce them, and therefore to how much effort is required in the production.
Tenseness as a phonemic contrast is quite rare in natlangs, though English is an excellent example. It has full series of both tense and lax vowels:
| Tense | Lax |
|---|---|
| feet | fit |
| bared | bed |
| cart | cat |
| port | pot |
| pool | pull |
In the IPA, only the first and last of these pairs have separate symbols (/i/ and /u/ tense, /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ lax). Other symbols can be used for either tense or lax vowels: for instance, /ɛ/ is the usual symbol for the lax vowel in "bed", but German has a tense /ɛ/ in "Bär". Since laxness is equivalent to moving a vowel closer to the centre of the vowel space, lax vowels can be distinguished with the "mid-centralized" diacritic (X-Sampa _x).
(Note that in languages that distinguish only three vowel heights, /e/ and /o/ are often used to represent tense vowels of the mid height, and /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ for lax vowels at this height. This leads to the confusion of some people thinking that /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ inherently represent lax vowels, which is not the case.)
Lax vowels are also less fully rounded than tense vowels, which is why the IPA symbol /ʊ/ does not have separate rounded and unrounded versions; it is considered to be of "neutral" roundedness.
Z-Sampa has separate symbols for the most important lax vowels, keeping the normal X-Sampa symbols for tense vowels. Where two symbols are given, the first is unrounded and the second rounded:
- Front mid lax vowels /E\ 2\/ (thus in Z-Sampa /E\/ is the representation of the vowel in "bed")
- Back low unrounded lax vowel /A\/
- Back mid lax vowels /7\ o\/
