Consonants Modern English has the following consonant phonemes: One of the questions for the historical study of English is where and how these phonemes originated. To start that process, examine the set of consonant phonemes …
chapter 11.10: features and rules As discussed in the sections above on consonants and vowels, phonemes can be categorized by certain distinctive features. Understanding these features will be very important when it comes time to …
chapter 11.9: vowel sound changes Vowels are fundamentally different from consonants in several ways that affect how they can change. First, all vowels are voiced, so there cannot be a change in voicing. Second, all …
chapter 11.8: Assimilation The principle of least effort, also called ease of articulation, describes how speakers of a language naturally seek to expend the least effort possible to articulate sounds without losing intelligibility. Illustrations of …
chapter 11.7: Unconditioned sound changes One of the primary areas of change within a language is the change in its system of sounds, and much of the nineteenth-century work in linguistics was spent in figuring …
chapter 11.6: allophones Allophones are non-meaningfully distinct variations within phonemes that do not provide a contrastive difference with each other. These are the sound variations that will fail the minimal pair test. While there are …
chapter 11.5: vowels Like consonants, vowels are made by expelling air from the lungs through the vibrating vocal cords and into the oral cavity. Unlike the consonants, however, when we make the vowel sounds we …
chapter 11.4: consonants The following chart gives the IPA symbols for each of the 24 consonants used in General American English. An interactive chart with sound examples of each phoneme tags: phonology can be found …
chapter 11.3: phonemes A phoneme is the smallest meaningful unit of sound. The key word in this definition is meaningful. Although speech is continuous, as we listen to someone speaking, we are able to break …
Chapter 11.2 The organs of speech When we speak, we use our vocal tracts to produce sounds, or phones. Before examining the sounds we make in English, it is helpful to understand what these organs …