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Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and , pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and , which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels.Symbols to the right in a cell are voiced, to the left are voiceless. Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible.Symbols to the right in a cell are voiced, to the left are voiceless. Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible.Vowels beside dots are: unrounded • rounded In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and , pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and , which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels. Since the number of possible sounds in all of the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one alphabet, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each attested consonant. In fact, the English alphabet 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, the sound spelled 'th' in 'this' is a different consonant than the 'th' sound in 'thin'. (In the IPA, they are transcribed and , respectively.) The word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant-, from cōnsonāns (littera) 'sounding-together (letter)', a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon (plural sýmphōna). Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna 'pronounced with' because they can only be pronounced with a vowel. He divides them into two subcategories: hēmíphōna, semivowels ('half-pronounced'), which correspond to continuants, not semivowels, and áphōna, mute or silent consonants ('unvoiced'), which correspond to stops, not voiceless consonants. This description does not apply to some human languages, such as the Salishan languages, in which stops sometimes occur without vowels (see Nuxálk), and the modern conception of consonant does not require co-occurrence with vowels. The word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, 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, the vowel /ɪ/ in myth, the vowel /i/ in funny, and the diphthong /aɪ/ in my. W always represents a consonant except in combination with a vowel letter, as in growth, raw, and how, and in a few loanwords from Welsh, like crwth or cwm. In some other languages, such as Finnish, y only represents a vowel sound. 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 one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil . On the other, there are approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the y in English yes . Some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel /i/, so that the English word bit would phonemically be /bit/, beet would be /bii̯t/, and yield would be phonemically /i̯ii̯ld/. Likewise, foot would be /fut/, food would be /fuu̯d/, wood would be /u̯ud/, and wooed would be /u̯uu̯d/. However, there is a (perhaps allophonic) difference in articulation between these segments, with the in yes and yield and the of wooed having more constriction and a more definite place of articulation than the in boil or bit or the of foot.

[ "Speech recognition", "Linguistics", "Communication", "Vowel", "Secondary articulation", "Retroflex consonant", "Sonorant", "Lateral consonant", "Dental consonant" ]
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