Tenseness

In general, tense vowels are more close (and correspondingly have lower first formants) than their lax counterparts. Tense vowels are sometimes claimed to be articulated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels, but this varies, and in some languages, it is the lax vowels that are more advanced, or a single language may be inconsistent between front and back or high and mid vowels. The traditional definition, that tense vowels are produced with more "muscular tension" than lax vowels, has not been confirmed by phonetic experiments. Another hypothesis is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels. There are also linguists who believe that there is no phonetic correlation to the tense–lax opposition. In many Germanic languages, such as RP English, and Standard German tense vowels are longer in duration than lax vowels, but in Scots, Scottish English, General American English, and Icelandic, there is no such correlation. The standard variety of Yiddish lacks a vowel length distinction entirely. Germanic languages prefer tense vowels in open syllables (so-called free vowels) and lax vowels in closed syllables (so-called checked vowels). ==Consonants==

Occasionally, tenseness has been used to distinguish pairs of contrasting consonants in languages. Korean, for example, has a three-way contrast among stops and affricates; the three series are often transcribed as - - . The contrast between the series and the series is sometimes said to be a function of tenseness: the former are lax and the latter tense. In this case the definition of "tense" would have to include greater glottal tension. In Ewe, and are articulated with a strong articulation, and , to better distinguish them from weaker and . In some dialects of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, there is a contrast between and . Again, the former set have sometimes been described as lax and the latter set as tense. It is not clear what phonetic characteristics other than greater duration would then be associated with tenseness. Some researchers have argued that the contrast in German, traditionally described as voice ( vs. ), is in fact better analyzed as tenseness since the latter set is voiceless in Southern German. German linguists call the distinction fortis and lenis rather than tense and lax. Tenseness is especially used to explain stop consonants of the Alemannic German dialects because they have two series of them that are identically voiceless and unaspirated. However, it is debated whether the distinction is really a result of different muscular tension and not of gemination. ==See also==