Close Mid Back Rounded Vowel Puns

The Japanese /u/ got unrounded and now its fronted closer to an [ ɨ ]

Although not the most common vowels in the world, the front rounded vowels /y ø œ/ seem to occur much more frequently than their back unrounded /ɯ ɤ ʌ/ amongst world languages. Why is this?

Seems like all of these are rare, but why?

They are so rare that Wikipedia only lists one or two languages with /ɶ/ while there isn’t even an article on /ɒ̈/. Meanwhile, /ɒ/ seems to be present in a larger segment of languages.

What makes the rounded “A” vowels so rare?

I've been thinking about this question a lot recently, since I saw a discussion on a linguistics forum about the pronunciation of "google". Most users were transcribing their pronunciation as [guːgɫ] but that strikes me as odd for some reason.

In "google" and other instances where most people say they have [u], I have [ʉ] instead. So I would have [gʉːgɫ] or sometimes even [gʉːgu] in rapid speech. This holds true in most instances of the high back rounded vowel that I can think of. So, I have [hʉʊ̯] for "who", [kjʉːʔ] for "cute", etc. In fact, [u] only exists, as far as I can tell, in place of an elided [l] as shown above.

So I was wondering if this is common amongst speakers of North American or General American English, or if it is restricted to certain dialects, or maybe even just my own ideolect. For some background, I'm from Northeastern West Virginia, although my dialect is more akin to Midland American English with some Appalachian quirks thrown in.

I notice when I pronounce [ɔ] I round my lips much less than when I pronounce [o]. Is there any research on this?

not sure if its just me or but in rounded vowels does the forwardness and rounding of your lips (on how open or closed it is) matter more on the quality of the vowel than the height? i can pronounce a high vowel like [o] or [u] with my tongue pretty open but with my lips close to eachother and an [ɑ] just by changing the shape of my lips while in a unrounded vowel like [a] or [i] i cant do that i need to change my tongue's height

is it just me or is it a thing?

(Also not sure which flair's best for this post as there are many)

Is it “front is always compressed, central and back are always protruded”?

Hi guys, can anyone give me some examples of words that have front rounded vowels in Mandarin. these are absent in english so im kind of confused. thanks :D

My belts are pretty decent, healthy, and comfortable on all syllables up to A4. But once I get to Bb4-C#5 territory, I have a lot of trouble on pretty much all syllables other than "ah" and "ee" unless it's very short. Rounding it out helps a bit but it makes for a weird transition to the next word sometimes. For example, in Impossible year, I often try changing "bitter pill I swallow" to "bitter pell I swallow" but it always sounds weird and the transition from "ell" to "aye" sounds weird. How do I fix this? I know the shape in your throat should stay the same for different vowels and your mouth should be the only thing changing shape and I understand this in theory, but can't make it work in practice.

I was looking at the IPA phonology of english vowels, comparing the general American with the received pronunciation. It lists some of the vowels as rounded and unrounded, and I was wondering if that's the same as short/long (lax/tense).

i am fucking Zonked

I’m a native English speaker and I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while. All that I can find is that rounded vowels supposedly require rounding of the lips. However, when I say rounded vowels in English like /u/ /ʊ/ etc, that is not the case. So I don’t understand what makes a vowel “rounded”.

I keep noticing Greeks who seem to "harden" the way they pronounce 'μι' relative to what seems to be "standard" (unmarked) pronunciation.

In other words, a word like νομίζω is typically pronounced like /noˈmi.zo/. And the tendency I observe is for people (who exhibit this feature) to pronounce it as /noˈmɨ.zo/, with the /i/ vowel pulled back to the position of a "close/high central unrounded vowel" /ɨ/.

Is this some kind of localized feature or accent (i.e. of Athenian speakers)? Or is it a trend among young people? I seem to hear it most frequently from younger people and, especially, Greek rappers.

Here's a clear example of it from a singer/rapper named Semeli (at the 1:28 mark of a Live Session), where she says, "Θα ξεκινήσω με κάτι που νομίζω..."

*As an aside (for anyone who might be familiar with Russian), this is very similar to the difference between the "soft" palatalized Russian consonant "ми" [mʲi] and the "hard" palatalized Russian consonant in "мы" [mɨ].

So I've been messing around with Gleb for a while, and I think I've found a couple of the absolute ugliest languages it can spit out, perfect for orc-like creatures. My first batch Uglang tests did not take practical considerations into account and I was left using huge phonologies or impossible clusters. Here's the one that lasted the longest in my notes, phonology stolen directly from Gleb:

Syllable Structure: (C)V
Once I realised I'd have trouble explaining to a layman how to pronounce some of these sounds, I gave up.

 
By the second round of testing I was consistently using the third randomly generated word as the name of the language. I give you my current project, GLEB 0.3.1a/5.0a seed:181634334 or Ragrgik:

Syllable Structure: (C)V(C)(F) Where F is non-stop, i.e. one of /m n f s h ɾ w/. The allophony listed is quite complex and I still haven't officially codified it:

I plan to make the language OSV and isolating. I plan to use a latin-based orthography so that the ugliness of the words can truly be appreciated, possibly written with a "low register" without allophony and a "high register" where I just go nuts and apply all 36 of the sound changes that Gleb demanded of me. As for lexicon, it will be entirely randomly assigned, except for o̯ø̃gakʰh which obviously means coconut.

 

So what do you think? Is it sufficiently ugly on first appearances, even more so when the "local accent" is applied?

EDIT: /ʔ/ was missing from the table.