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A simple lateral click is made in English to get a horse ... English and many other languages may use bare click releases ... has 45 to 115 click phonemes, ...
Estimates of phoneme-inventory size can differ radically between sources, occasionally by a factor of several hundred percent. For instance, Received Pronunciation of English has been claimed to have anywhere between 11 and 27 vowels, whereas West ǃXoon has been analyzed as having anywhere from 87 to 164 consonants.
Certain words in the English language represent animal sounds: the noises and vocalizations of particular animals, especially noises used by animals for communication. The words can be used as verbs or interjections in addition to nouns , and many of them are also specifically onomatopoeic .
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 distinction between the vowels of horse and hoarse is maintained in traditional non-rhotic New England accents as [hɒs] for horse (with the same vowel as cot and caught) vs. [hoəs] for hoarse, though the horse–hoarse merger is certainly on the rise in the region today. The /æ/ phoneme has highly distinct allophones before nasal consonants.
In Scottish English, mid front /ɛːr/ and /ɛr/ are merged into /er/, paralleling the mid back vowel horse–hoarse merger, which Scottish English lacks. The vowel in fir /ɪr/ is usually distinct, but is liable to merge than /ər/ because their non-rhoticized equivalents /ɪ/ and /ə/ belong to the same phoneme; this parallels the hurry ...
Pin–pen merger: the raising of /ɛ/ to /ɪ/ before nasal consonants in Southern American English and southwestern varieties of Hiberno-English. Horse-hoarse merger: /ɔr/ and /or/ merge in many varieties of English; Vowel mergers before intervocalic /r/ in most of North America (resistance occurs mainly on the east coast):
The article English phonology states that "English has a particularly large number of vowel phonemes" and that "there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14–16 in General American and 20–21 in Australian English".