cardinal vowel

Phoneticians have always needed some way of classifying vowels which is independent of the
vowel system of a particular language. With most consonants it is quite easy to observe how their
articulation is organised, and to specify the place and manner of the constriction formed; vowels,
however, are much less easy to observe. Early in the 20th century, the English phonetician Daniel
Jones worked out a set of cardinal vowels that students learning phonetics could be taught to
make and which would serve as reference points that other vowels could be related to, rather like
the corners and sides of a map. Jones was strongly influenced by the French phonetician Paul
Passy, and it has been claimed that the set of cardinal vowels is rather similar to the vowels of
educated Parisian French of the time.
From the beginning it was important to locate the vowels on a chart or four-sided figure (the exact
shape of which has changed from time to time), as can be seen on the IPA chart. The cardinal
vowel diagram is used both for rounded and unrounded vowels, and Jones proposed that there
should be a primary set of cardinal vowels and a secondary set. The primary set includes the front
unrounded vowels [i, e, , a], the back unrounded vowel [+ and the rounded back vowels *, o, u+,
while the secondary set comprises the front rounded vowels *y, , , +, the back rounded *+ and the
back unrounded *, , +. For the sake of consistency, I believe it would be better to abandon the
primary/secondary division and simply give a rounded or unrounded label (as appropriate)
to each vowel on the quadrilateral.
Phonetic ear-training makes much use of the cardinal cowel system, and students can learn to
identify and discriminate a very large number of different vowels in relation to the cardinal
vowels.
homophone
If two different words are pronounced identically, they are homophones. In many cases they will
be spelt differently (e.g. saw sore soar in BBC pronunciation), but homophony is possible
also in the case of pairs like bear (verb) and bear (noun) which are spelt the same.