cardinal vowel ˌkɑːdɪnəl ˈvaʊəl 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 [ɪ, e, ɛ, a], the back unrounded vowel [ɑ] and the rounded back vowels [ɔ, o, u], while the secondary set comprises the front rounded vowels [y, ø, oe, ɶ], the back rounded [ɒ] and the back unrounded [ʌ, ɤ, ɯ]. 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 vowel system, and students can learn to identify and discriminate a very large number of different vowels in relation to the cardinal vowels. | 