TENSENESS

Tenseness

In phonology, tenseness is a particular vowel quality that is phonemically contrastive in many languages, including English. It has also occasionally been used to describe contrasts in consonants. Unlike most distinctive features, the feature 1 can be interpreted only relatively, that is, in a language like English that contrasts and, the former can be described as a tense vowel while the latter is a lax vowel. Another example is Vietnamese, where the letters ă and â represent lax vowels, and the letters a and ơ the corresponding tense vowels. Some languages like ...

The above text is a snippet from Wikipedia: Tenseness
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

tenseness

Noun

  1. The characteristic of being tense.
  2. A particular vowel or consonant quality that is phonemically contrastive in many languages, including English.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: tenseness
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

Need help with a clue?
Try your search in the crossword dictionary!