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?N-Vee
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 wonder, Mr. Bone man, what you’re thinking
of your fury now, gone sour as a sinking whale,
crawling up the alphabet on her own bones.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)