Places of articulation Labial Bilabial Labial-velar

Consonant
2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Linguistics

Labial-alveolar Labiodental Bidental Coronal Linguolabial Interdental Dental Alveolar Apical Laminal Postalveolar Alveolo-palatal Retroflex Dorsal Palatal Labial-palatal Velar Uvular Uvular-epiglottal Radical Pharyngeal Epiglotto-pharyngeal Epiglottal Glottal
This page containsphonetic information in IPA, which may not display correctly in some browsers. [Help] [Edit]

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper vocal tract, the upper vocal tract being defined as that part of the vocal tract that lies above the larynx. Since the number of consonants in the world's languages is much greater than the number of consonant letters in any one alphabet, linguistshave devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique symbol to each attested consonant. In fact, the Latin alphabet, which is used to write English, has fewer consonant letters than English has consonant sounds, so digraphs like "sh" and "th" are used to extend the alphabet, and some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, many speakers are not aware that the sound spelled "th" in "this" is a different consonant than the "th" sound in "thing". (In the IPA they're transcribed and , respectively.)

Origin of the term

The word consonant comes from Latin cnsontantem, accusative of cnsonns (littera) "sounding-together (letter)", a loan translation of Greek smphnon. As originally conceived by Plato, smphna were specifically the stop consonants, described as "not being pronounceable without an adjacent vowel sound". Thus the term did not cover continuant consonants, which occur without vowels in a large minority of languages, for example at the ends of the English words bottle and button. (The final vowel letters e and o in these words are only a product of orthography; Plato was concerned with pronunciation.) However, even Plato's original conception of consonant is inadequate for the universal description of human language, since

in some languages, such as the Salishan languages, stop consonants may also occur without

vowels (see Nuxlk), and the modern conception of consonant does not require cooccurrence with vowels.

Consonantal features
Each consonant can be distinguished by several features: The manner of articulation is the method that the consonant is articulated, such as nasal

(through the nose), stop (complete obstruction of air), or approximant (vowel like). The place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant

occurs, and which speech organs are involved. Places include bilabial (both lips), alveolar (tongue against the gum ridge), and velar (tongue against soft palate). Additionally, there may be a simultaneous narrowing at another place of articulation, such as palatalisation or pharyngealisation. The phonation of a consonant is how the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation.

When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is calledvoiced; when they do not vibrate at all, it's voiceless. The voice onset time (VOT) indicates the timing of the phonation. Aspiration is a feature

of VOT. The airstream mechanism is how the air moving through the vocal tract is powered. Most

languages have exclusively pulmonic egressive consonants, which use the lungs and diaphragm, but ejectives, clicks, and implosives use different mechanisms. The length is how long the obstruction of a consonant lasts. This feature is borderline

distinctive in English, as in "wholly" [holli] vs. "holy"[holi], but cases are limited to morpheme boundaries. Unrelated roots are differentiated in various languages such as Italian, Japanese and Finnish, with two length levels, "single" and " geminate". Estonian and some Sami languages have three phonemic lengths: short, geminate, and long geminate, although the distinction between the geminate and overlong geminate includes suprasegmental features. The articulatory force is how much muscular energy is involved. This has been proposed

many times, but no distinction relying exclusively on force has ever been demonstrated. All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop consonant" [t]. In this case the airstream mechanism is omitted.

Some pairs of consonants like p::b, t::d are sometimes called fortis and lenis, but this is a phonological rather than phonetic distinction.
Manners of articulation

Obstruent

Stop

Affricate

Fricative

Sibilant

Sonorant

Nasal

Flaps/Tap

Trill

Approximant

Liquid

Vowel

Semivowel

Lateral

Airstreams

Ejective

Implosive

Click
This page containsphonetic information in IPA, which may not display correctly in some browsers.[Help]

Consonant as a symbol
The word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. Consonant letters in the English alphabet areB, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y: The letter Y stands for the consonant [j] in "yoke", and for the vowel []in "myth", for example; W is almost always a consonant except in rare words like "crwth" "cwm".

Consonants and vowels

Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a syllable: The most sonorous part of the syllable (that is, the part that's easiest to sing), called the syllabic peak or nucleus, is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins (called the onset and coda) are typically consonants. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC, where C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel. This can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the world's languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut: there are syllabic consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the world's languages. One blurry area is in segments variously called semivowels, semiconsonants, or glides. On the one side, there are vowel-like segments which are not in themselves syllabic, but which form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil [bl]. On the other, there areapproximants which behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the y in English yes [js]. Some phonologists model these as both being the vowel /i/, so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/, beet would be /biit/, and yieldwould be phonemically /iiild/. Similarly, foot would be /fut/, food would be /fuud/, wood would be /uud/, and wooed would be /uuud/. However, there is a (perhaps allophonic) difference in articulation between these segments, with the [j] in [js] yes and [jild] yield and the [w] of[wud] wooed having more constriction

and a more definite place of articulation than the [] in [bl] boil or [bt] bit or the [] of [ft]. The other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, that is, segments which are articulated as consonants but which occupy the nucleus of a syllable. This may be the case for words such as church in rhotic dialects of English, although phoneticians differ in whether they consider this to be a syllabic consonant, /tt/, or a rhotic vowel, /tt/: Some distinguish an approximant // that corresponds to a vowel //, for rural as / l/ or [l]; others see these as the a single phoneme, /l/. Other languages utilize fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech and several languages in Congo and China, including Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, they are historically allophones of /i/, and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these "fricative vowels" and say that "they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels." That is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels. Many Slavic languages allow the trill [r] and the lateral [l] as syllabic nuclei (see Words without vowels), and in languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is (it may be that not all syllables have nuclei), though if the concept of 'syllable' applies, there are syllabic consonants in words like /sxs/ 'seal fat'.
This Wikipedia Selection is sponsored by SOS Children , and consists of a hand selection from the English Wikipedia articles with only minor deletions (see www.wikipedia.org for details of authors and sources). The articles are available under the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer. This article was sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=183896477 .