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Syllabic Consonants
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English language, English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacritic in the International Phonetic Alphabet is used, . It may be instead represented by an overstroke, if the symbol that it modifies has a descender, such as in . Syllabic consonants in most languages are sonorants, such as Nasal consonant, nasals and Liquid consonant, liquids. Very few have syllabic obstruents, such as Stop consonant, stops and fricatives in normal words, but English has syllabic fricatives in Paralanguage, paralinguistic words like ''shh!'' and ''zzz''. Examples Germanic languages In many varieties of High German, High and Low German, pronouncing syllabic consonants may be considered a shibboleth. In High German and Tweants (a Low Saxon dialect spoken in the Netherlands; more Low Saxon dialects have t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and 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 speech sounds in 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. The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like , , , and are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |