*** Welcome to piglix ***

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 ⠲ (braille pattern dots-256) ⠕ (braille pattern dots-135)
Sound
IPA vowel chart
Front Near-​front Central Near-​back Back
Close
Blank vowel trapezoid.svg
i • y
ɨ • ʉ
ɯ • u
ɪ • ʏ
ɪ̈ • ʊ̈
ɯ̽ • ʊ
e • ø
ɘ • ɵ
ɤ • o
 • ø̞
ə • ɵ̞
ɤ̞ • 
ɛ • œ
ɜ • ɞ
ʌ • ɔ
æ • 
ɐ • ɞ̞
a • ɶ
ä • ɒ̈
ɑ • ɒ
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open
Paired vowels are: unrounded • rounded
This table contains phonetic symbols, which may not display correctly in some browsers. [Help]

IPA help • IPA key • chart • Loudspeaker.svg 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 ⟨Latin letter small capital Gamma.svg⟩, sometimes called "baby gamma", which has a flat top. The symbol was revised to be ⟨Ram's horns.svg⟩, "ram's horns", with a rounded top, in order to better differentiate it from the Latin gammaɣ⟩.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

...