Questions tagged [consonants]
a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract.
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Italian words with post-stress -/tj/-
It is well known that Italian -/.tj/- developed into -/t.tsj/- after stressed syllables (gratiam -> grazia). There are, however, several rare words that end in post-stressed -/tj/- like "òstia&...
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Does Tibetan have nasalized consonants, or is the nasalness on the vowels?
I am working with a native Tibetan speaker to translate some words from Tibetan into English, and I noticed they were marking the pronunciation of certain consonants with a nasal marker.
They marked ...
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Where can I find all of the consonant/vowel word formation formulas for a given language? And what is the name of this?
I'm new to linguistics. I've seen that there are CVC or VVC or similar structures presented in online resources (for example Wikipedia) to denote the possible combinations of sounds.
I want to find a ...
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Does Lakhota contrast voicing in stops?
WALS Online lists Lakhota as only having a voicing contrast in fricatives (referencing a study by Richard Carter in 1974). However, its Wikipedia article says that it has phonemic voiced bilabial and ...
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Are there languages with more vowels than consonants?
Almost all languages of the world have more consonants than vowels. Are there some languages of the world with more vowel phonemes than consonants?
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Why were vowels secondary citizens in many of the worlds sound-based writing systems?
Not considering logographic systems like Chinese, and outside Cuneiform (not sure if that is a logo system or something else), it appears at first glance that many of the world's writing systems ...
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How do other cultures categorize phonemes?
I don't know where it came from, but the "west" at least as I have learned, came up with the idea of "vowels" and "consonants" at some point, and we just go with that ...
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Why isn't the American r considered a vowel?
As a native American English speaker from the Northwest, whenever I isolate the r in words like "right" or "rope" it's always /ɚ/, the same as the r in words like "first" ...
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What is the name of rear nasal t in 'written' or d in 'ridden'?
I just noticed that usually when I say 'ridden' or sometimes 'written', I don't let the air escape around my tongue as 'duh' or 'tuh' but instead keep it sealed and do something at back of my nose to ...
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Glottal or Stop /v/?
I am an amateur in linguistics. I was listening to three different British RP pronunciations of the word "massive".
https://www.google.com/search?q=pronounce+massive (Make sure to select ...
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In Classical/Biblical Hebrew, why is CHAF not considered a guttural?
According to "A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew" by Jacob Weingreen, page 19, the four gutturals are ALEF (א), HEI (ה), CHET (ח), and AYIN (ע). And gutturals make a difference as to ...
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Difference between voiced and lenis consonants in English
What is difference between voiced and lenis consonants in English language.
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What is the difference (if any) between a prenasalized voiced bilabial plosive and a voiced bilabial plosive with prolonged closure?
The consonant [b] can be prevoiced, so it would seem, at least at first blush, that prolonging the closure for this plosive would entail prenasalizing it. I've tried to produce it without ...
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Where can I find a list of phonetically possible consonant clusters?
I wanted a list of consonant clusters 2 to 5 consonants long that are phonetically possible, in other words, possible for the human speech mechanism to produce. Unfortunately, I have been unable to ...
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Corsican vowels
In Corsican, some vowels are nasalized before a nasal consonant in the same syllable. What do these vowels have in common? Here are some examples:
'prin.tʃi.pe = prince
'fun.gu = mushroom
'ãn.ku = ...
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Does modern greek really nasalise intervowel γγ?
During my previous studies I was introduced to ancient Greek and, among other things, I learned that we believe double gamma γγ was pronounced like a prenasalised gamma, something like "ng", ...
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Is there some equivalent of a "Grimm's law" that applies to the Semitic language family?
Arabic has سلام (salaam) and Hebrew has שָׁלוֹם (shalom). The words have similar meanings of "peace". This seems like a case of an alveolar fricative shifting to post-alveolar fricative (...
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A language without consonants
I know that Rotokas language has fewer consonants than most (all?) languages. But I haven't been able to find a language that has no consonants (whether phonemic or phonetic). Does such a language ...
user30668
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Is there a standard(-ish) definition of affricate aspiration/VOT?
Is the frication of an affricate considered part of its aspiration? Or does the aspiration start at the end of the frication?
And does voice onset time (VOT) measure aspiration (as defined by the ...
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order of tables in the IPA chart -- is there a reason?
I was told by a friend that the order of tables in the IPA chart is not completely arbitrary, but has some motivation to it. In particular, that C tables come before the V table, as features of C ...
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What is the longest word without a vowel in any language?
(see edit below before you answer!)
I'm not a linguist, but I've always been fascinated by the fact that in Czech, there is a 9-letter word without a single vowel: čtvrthrst. It means "quarter of ...
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What does "fine-grained voicing distinctions" for consonants mean according to IPA?
In the Handbook Of The International Phonetic Association is mentioned this paragraph:
Voicing distinctions are actually more fine-grained than implied by
this two-way distinction [voiced and ...
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Pronunciation of double IPA consonants
Let's say an IPA pronunciation contains a double consonant, such as "dd" or "ss". Does that really mean this consonant should be pronounced twice?
There are examples where this ...
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The possible sound change when /t/ sound is preceded by fricatives or affricatives
Here, I am talking about the assimilated /t/ sound that is one of the most common features of Standard Southern British English (such as /t/ at the beginning of a syllable, time, task, Twitter, twice, ...
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Has a sound change ever happened that voiced only stops in between vowels and not fricatives?
Has this ever happened? Can it happen? I'm a novice in linguistics and I'm trying to study sound changes.
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Phonetic vs phonological consonants: What is the difference?
I come across such distinctions in quite a few places such as in this Wikipedia article, Voiceless glottal fricative, where it states: "The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless ...
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Has the development of double consonants in Latin been studied?
When one studies both Latin and Greek, one of the most prominent differences between the two is the much greater number of double consonants in Latin. While Greek does have some instances of them, ...
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How to Tell Apart Voiced Consonants and Unaspirated Unvoiced Consonants
In languages like Hokkien that use all of the following consonants: /p/, /b/, and /ph/, how do you tell apart /p/ and /b/? Someone once taught me a trick where you say, "spy" and "buy&...
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The aspiration of consonants among languages [closed]
I am busy researching the aspiration of consonants among languages. Specifically whether consonants are pre-aspirated or post-aspirated and whether the aspiration occurs in complementary distribution (...
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Labialised /r/ in RP
Is /r/ in RP labialised in all positions?
For example: In words like real, free, proud, tree, brother, borrow, dream, throw etc.
Is it labialised in all positions (like intervocalic, post-...
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What's with an j/w alternation in some PIE pronouns?
There's a seeming alternation between *j (IEist notation *y) and *w in the PIE 2nd person pronoun (such as between *tewe and *toy) and in the reflexive pronoun (such as between *sewe and *soy). What's ...
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Dental plosive with no apical obstruction
Can I have a paper which describes dental plosives by the two rows of teeth as opposed to contacting the dental area with the tongue ?? I mean the air needs obstructed and the posterior most place of ...
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Are consonants more stable than vowels?
I was trying my hand at an exercise to distinguish the different Sámi dialects (the exercise was used in the 2020 version of the Dutch Linguistics Olympiad). It gives nine words in all nine dialects ...
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Is there a theory challenging the "strict" distinction between Thai and Vietnamese?
I understand Thai and Lao and all their dialects, and Vietnamese and all its dialects to be of totally different language evolutionary families (Tai Kra-Dai and Astroasiatic).
I can speak and read ...
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palatalization of plosive consonants
I am trying to learn how to palatalize the consonants. As far as I understand, one must bring the tongue closer to the position of where the vowel [i] is produced while still performing the consonant. ...
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IPA consonant chart confusion, which chart to use?
I'm a bit confuse between three IPA consonants chart.
The consonant chart from the official IPA chart;
The chart from the English Wikipedia which has different symbol for the same sound but contains ...
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Do voiceless approximants exist? What is the consensus among phoneticians/phonologists?
Voiceless sounds that are produced with supralaryngeal configurations that would be considered approximants if voiced are attested in languages (i.e. [j̊], [l̥], etc.), but none are found to contrast ...
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Aspiration of voiced consonants
I have read in the wikipedia about aspiration that "voiced consonants are seldom actually aspirated", unlike their unvoiced counterparts. It does not seem so to me. Assuming that aspiration is the ...
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How many consonant clusters can a human being utter?
Most Indian languages have three consonant clusters.I think that English has got three consonant clusters.Example, strange.
I would like to know which language has got the most consonant clusters.
I ...
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Non-African Click Languages
Paralinguistic clicks are quite common across world's languages. But paralinguistic clicks usually appears as ideophones. But why is Africa the only continent that uses click consonants? Are there any ...
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Australia - absence of sibilants
Are there any sciencific/linguistic/historical theories about reasons of absence of sibilants in some Australian languages? As far as I know, sibilants are common accross world languages. Since ...
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Why isn't intervocalic /ŋ/ analyzed as an onset in English?
I think that sɪ.ŋɪŋ does not seem too unreasonable as a syllabification of the word singing, so I'm a bit puzzled why that option for the syllabification of intervocalic /ŋ/ seems to be dismissed in ...
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The German consonant "c" changes to the English "g"
What is the name of a sound shift law under which the German consonant "c" changes to the English "g", e.g.
Macht -> might;
Nacht -> night;
Tochter -> daughter;
fechten -> fight;
recht -> right;
...
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Cause: [z] --> [s] at the end
Someone said that there is a sound beginning [z], turning into [s] at the end of words like cause. Maybe, this is just a recommendation on how to pronounce English consonants correctly, but if it is ...
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How to do the Xhosa clicks
So this video explains clearly how to do the 3 Xhosa clicks at the same time as each vowel sound. The Wikipedia page also shows clearly how to produce those 3 clicks as well, independent of any vowel ...
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Good audio resources for the ejective consonants
I think I understand the ejective consonants, but even after listening to the Wikipedia audio clips, I am not sure I would be able to distinguish them from the corresponding "regular" consonant, like ...
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Dataset/Database similar to WALS in Vowel/Phonology
I am wondering if there is any database similar to The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS)(https://wals.info/). In the case that it is specifically more geared towards phonological aspects of ...
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Vowel Change in Europe Book
Perhaps a rogue question but my father loves languages and when on holiday in Holland was trying to tell me about the two vowel (or constant? Shifts) changes that occured, and so why English and ...
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Are alveolar stops really alveolar stops?
I noted that to make the sound the sides of the tongue make an occlusion in the laterals, this would mean the point of greatest constriction isn't just in the alveolar ridge.
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If a syllabic consonant can be a plosive
Wondering if a Syllabic Consonant can be a plosive such as t or p. Maybe Nuxalk has this feature, I don't know.
Basically if you would say something like /p't'p't'/ (where ' is for explosive), ...
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