Everything about Consonant totally explained
In
articulatory phonetics, a
consonant is a
speech sound that's 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,
linguists have devised systems such as the (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 "ch", "sh", "th", and "zh" 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 ð and θ, respectively.)
Origin of the term
The word
consonant comes from
Latin oblique stem
cōnsonant-, from
cōnsonāns (littera) "sounding-together (letter)", a
loan translation of Greek σύμφωνον
sýmphōnon. As originally conceived by Plato,
sýmphōna were specifically the
stop consonants, described as "not being pronounceable without an adjacent vowel sound". Thus the term didn't cover
continuant consonants, which occur without vowels in a 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
Nuxálk), and the modern conception of consonant doesn't require cooccurrence with vowels.
Consonantal features
Each consonant can be distinguished by several
features: 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're consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels.
Many
Slavic languages allow the trill [r̩] and the lateral [l̩] as syllabic nuclei (see
Words without vowels), and in languages like
Nuxalk, it's 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 /sx̩s/ 'seal fat'.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Consonant'.
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