Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
The following are the non-pulmonic consonants.They are sounds whose airflow is not dependent on the lungs. These include clicks (found in the Khoisan languages and some neighboring Bantu languages of Africa), implosives (found in languages such as Sindhi, Hausa, Swahili and Vietnamese), and ejectives (found in many Amerindian and Caucasian languages).
For example, while the 'p' sounds of English pin and spin are pronounced differently (and this difference would be meaningful in some languages), the difference is not meaningful in English. Thus, phonemically the words are usually analyzed as /ˈpɪn/ and /ˈspɪn/ , with the same phoneme /p/ .
voiceless bilabial plosive [p] (spin) voiced bilabial plosive [b] (bed) voiceless bilabial affricate [pɸ] voiced bilabial affricate [bβ] voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ] voiced bilabial fricative [β] bilabial approximant [β̞] bilabial trill [ʙ] bilabial percussive [ʬ]
In English, a stop consonant is often added as a transitional sound between the parts of a nasal + fricative sequence: English hamster / ˈ h æ m s t ər / often pronounced with an added p sound, GA: [ˈhɛəmpstɚ] or RP: [ˈhampstə] English warmth / ˈ w ɔːr m θ / often pronounced with an added p sound, GA: [ˈwɔɹmpθ] or RP: [ˈwɔːmpθ]
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk , half , calf , etc., the w in two and sword , gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though , daughter , night , brought , and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
Some English words, including thrash, three, throat, and throw, start with the voiceless dental fricative /θ/, the liquid /r/, or the /r/ cluster (/θ/+/r/). This cluster example in Proto-Germanic has a counterpart in which /θ/ was followed by /l/. In early North and West Germanic, the /l/ cluster disappeared. This suggests that clusters are ...
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents.In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.