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The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like ch , sh , th , and ng are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled th in "this" is a different consonant from the th sound in "thin".
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 ...
Voiceless sonorants have a strong tendency to either revoice or undergo fortition, for example to form a fricative like /ç/ or /ɬ/. [example needed] In connected, continuous speech in North American English, /t/ and /d/ are usually flapped to following sonorants, including vowels, when followed by a vowel or syllabic /l/. [6]
For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced [s] when it follows a voiceless phoneme (cats), and [z] when it follows a voiced phoneme (dogs). [1] This type of assimilation is called progressive, where the second consonant assimilates to the first; regressive assimilation goes in the opposite direction, as can be seen in have to [hæftə].
Doubled orthographic consonants do not always indicate a long phonetic consonant. In English, for example, the [n] sound of running is not lengthened. Consonant digraphs are used in English to indicate the preceding vowel is a short (lax) vowel, while a single letter often allows a long (tense) vowel to occur.
English has fortis consonants, such as the p in pat, with a corresponding lenis consonant, such as the b in bat. Fortis and lenis consonants may be distinguished by tenseness or other characteristics, such as voicing , aspiration , glottalization , velarization , length , and length of nearby vowels.
The opposition between consonance and dissonance can be made in different contexts: In acoustics or psychophysiology, the distinction may be objective.In modern times, it usually is based on the perception of harmonic partials of the sounds considered, to such an extent that the distinction really holds only in the case of harmonic sounds (i.e. sounds with harmonic partials).
An oral consonant is a consonant sound in speech that is made by allowing air to escape from the mouth, as opposed to the nose, as in a nasal consonant.To create an intended oral consonant sound, the entire mouth plays a role in modifying the air's passageway.