International Phonetic Alphabet
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, corresponds to the close front rounded vowel, and the slightly different character corresponds to the near-close near-front rounded vowel.
It is indicative of the rarity of front rounded vowels that is the rarest sound represented in the IPA by a letter of the Latin alphabet, being cross-linguistically less than half as frequent as or and only about a quarter as frequent as .
The IPA symbol ("jod") represents the sound of the English letter ⟨y⟩ in the word "yes".
Read more about this topic: Y
Famous quotes containing the words phonetic and/or alphabet:
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned “Now I lay me” and the Lord’s Prayer and your father’s and mother’s name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)