Technical Note 1: Classifying Consonants……and one other thing
Many of these blogs will concentrate on how consonants have evolved in English and other related languages from which English has borrowed words. It will simplify the story to use a few technical terms (those in bold) to classify these sounds.
For our purposes, three ways of classifying consonants are particularly relevant.
First, some consonants are voiced (your vocal chords vibrate as the sound is articulated), while for others your vocal chords are disengaged and the consonant is said to be voiceless. This is readily observable in pairings like ‘s’ and ‘z’, ‘p’ and ‘b’, ‘t’ and ‘d’ and so on, where the first in each pair is distinguished from the second by the absence of voice.
Second, consonants can be classified into three groups by the degree of obstruction of air flow: Sonorants, Fricatives and Stops.
‘Sonorants’ are consonants which, like vowels (which are also considered ‘sonorants’), do not cause a ‘turbulent’ flow of air. In English these sounds are:
- nasals (‘m’, ‘n’ and ‘ng’ as in ‘sung’), which involve air being expelled through the nose rather than the mouth. As ‘ng’ is never used at the start of a word in English, we shall largely ignore it.
- so-called ‘liquids’ (‘l’ and ‘r’), where the mouth is open, with the tongue used to form the characteristic sound of the consonant; and
- ‘semi-vowels’ (‘w’ and ‘y’), so named because, as we shall see, they can alternate with ‘u’ and ‘i’ respectively. Again the mouth is open, with the sound formed by the lips/throat and the tongue respectively.
‘Fricatives’, while also not blocking the passage of air, place greater constraints than sonorants on air-flow, typically by leaving only a small gap between upper and lower points of articulation in the mouth. English fricatives are, from the front to the back of the mouth:
- One voiceless/voiced pair that engage your lower lip: ‘f’, ‘v’;
- one pair formed by the tip of your tongue, both spelt ‘th’: voiceless (as in ‘thin’) and voiced (as in ‘the’);
- two pairs of ‘sibilants’- voiceless ‘s’ and voiced ‘z’; and also ‘sh’ (as in ‘shop’) and its voiced equivalent (as in ‘leisure’), which we will write as ‘zh’ in this series of Blogs.
- the aspirate (‘breathed sound’)‘h’. For some types of English there is an additional fricative articulated further back in the mouth, as in the Scottish ‘loch’.
‘Stops’fully obstruct the passage of air at some point in their articulation. In English, these are:
- ‘p’, ‘b’, ‘t’, ‘d’, ‘k’ (including ‘hard c’ as in ‘cool’ as opposed to ‘ceiling’ and ‘q’) and ‘g’.
English also combines tip-of-the-tongue stops and fricatives to make a pair of what are called ‘Affricates’. These are:
- the voiceless sound of ‘ch’ in ‘cheese’ (‘t-ch’) and the voiced sound of ‘j’ in ‘jury’ (‘d-ge’). As you see, they can be thought of as either sounds in their own right or as combinations of a stop and a fricative.
Third, Consonants are also often classified by point of articulation. We will concentrate on four broad groups, running from the front to the back of the mouth, as follows:
- Labial (we called these ‘lip-sounds’ in the first blog, but will now use ‘labial’ as is normal practice.) The sounds are: ‘p’, ‘b’, ‘f’, ‘v’, ‘m’ and ‘w’.
Note, by the way, the first two consonants of ‘lip’ and ‘labial’. You can probably guess by now that the two words must have a common origin and that the more technical-sounding ‘labial’ is a borrowing from another Indo-European language (in this case, Latin).
- Dental (involving the tip of the tongue – the term we used in the first blog – touching the teeth, the alveolar ridge just behind the teeth, or just behind this). The sounds are: ‘t’, ‘d’, voiced and voiceless ‘th’, ‘n’, ‘l’, ‘s’ and ‘z’.
‘Teeth’ and ‘dental’ are related just as are ‘lip’ and ‘labial’, but you will have to wait for a later blog to discover why our inherited ‘tooth’ and ‘teeth’ have no ‘n’ to match the shape of our borrowed ‘dental’.
- Palatal (where your tongue touches or approaches your hard palate): I am including the English affricates ‘ch’ and ‘j’, and the fricatives ‘sh’ and its voiced equivalent (to be written as ‘zh’) here. The sound ‘r’ is often classified as palatal, though its articulation varies considerably among varieties of English. The sound ‘y’ as in ‘yet’ brings your tongue close to your hard palate further back.
- Velar (the velum is the soft palate towards the back of the roof of the mouth). The sounds are: ‘k’ and ‘hard c’, ‘g’, (also the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’, where used) and ‘ng’. I am also including English ‘h’ here for convenience: as you can feel, ‘h’ is open-throated rather than articulated.
The word‘guttural’(literally ‘of the throat’)is sometimes used to cover both palatal and velar sounds, even though no palatal and very few velar sounds in English are really throat sounds.
A class of stop consonants which is important for understanding Indo-European is one that combines two points of articulation, the labial and the velar, known therefore as the labio-velar sounds. English ‘qu’ is a vestige of this combination, and we shall come back to them later.
We will use terms in bold above as we progress, so come back to this Technical Note whenever you are in doubt about their meaning.
So what’s the ‘other thing’ in the title of this Technical Note?
At many points in blogs that follow, we need to mention sounds word-forms in languages that have never been written down, notably ‘Proto-Indo-European’ and some of its daughter-languages, such as Proto-Germanic, from which written languages such as English descend. Although we can reconstruct such sounds and word-forms with some confidence, they are indeed ‘re-constructions’, and to show this reconstructed forms will always be marked with an asterisk: *. We will also use an asterisk, this time in the company of italicised letters, for words which one might have expected from normal sound-changes, but which do not in fact exist for one reason or another.
Now that you are looking at consonants, just pause for a moment on the word ‘asterisk’. What shape is an asterisk?
And is it just a coincidence that the first three consonants of ‘asterisk’ and ‘star’ are identical?
You are right: it is not a coincidence!
But the reason why one word starts with an ‘s’ and the other with an ‘a’ before the ‘s’ will introduce a completely new set of consonants, used by that original speech-community but not generally recognised by linguists for over a century from the first understanding of Indo-European languages as a group. This classic case of the secrets hidden in the words you know will have to await a future post…..
Next up will be Blog 5.