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 ,
Near-open central vowel Near-open central vowel The near-open central vowel, or near-low central vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a rotated lowercase letter a. While the IPA does not specify the rounding of , its rounded variant has been reported to occur as a phoneme only in Sabiny, which contrasts overshort unrounded and overshort rounded near-open central vowels. In certain languages (e.g. Bulgarian, Cantonese and Portuguese), the symbol is used instead of to denote the open-mid central unrounded vowel. The near-open central unrounded vowel