Close-mid central unrounded vowel Close-mid central unrounded vowel The close-mid central unrounded vowel, or high-mid central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . This is a mirrored letter e, and should not be confused with the schwa , which is a turned e. It was added to the IPA in 1993; before that, this vowel was transcribed (Latin small letter e with umlaut, not Cyrillic small letter yo). Certain older sources transcribe this vowel . The letter may be used with a lowering diacritic ,
Vowel prepositions that consist of a single consonant letter, like "k" "to", "v" "in", and "s" "with". However, these forms are actually contractions of "ko", "vo", and "so" respectively, and these forms are still used in modern Russian before words with certain consonant clusters for ease of pronunciation. In Kazakh and certain other Turkic languages, words without vowel sounds may occur due to reduction of weak vowels. A common example is the Kazakh word for one: "bir", pronounced . Among careful speakers, however, the original vowel may be preserved, and the vowels are always preserved in the orthography. In Southern varieties