Practice question · True or false
Daniel Jones's cardinal vowels are the vowels of Received Pronunciation.
Hints
- Ask what the set is for.
- They are reference points, defined by articulation and learned from recordings.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. They are eight reference points around the edge of the vowel space, belonging to no language, and exist to give transcribers a fixed frame for locating the vowels of real languages. Treating them as an inventory misses the point of having them.
Practise English Vowels I: the Quadrilateral
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More questions on English Vowels I: the Quadrilateral
- Why are vowels described by tongue position rather than by place of articulation?
- Phonetic vowel length depends on both lexical vowel category and the following consonant. What follows from…
- Sort each accent feature by whether it is a MERGER or a SPLIT.
- How many monophthongs does the standard analysis of Received Pronunciation recognise?
- Which are true of vowel length in English?
- Match each dimension of vowel description to what it specifies.
- Complete the description of the vowel space.
- Arrange these vowels from the highest tongue position to the lowest.
- The consonant inventories of English accents differ far less than their vowel inventories.