Fricative consonant in the context of "Toda language"

Grimm's law, also known as the First Germanic Consonant Shift or First Germanic Sound Shift, is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the first millennium BC, first discovered by Rasmus Rask but systematically put forward by Jacob Grimm. It establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops and fricatives and stop consonants of certain other Indo-European languages.

In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is stricture, that is, how closely the speech organs approach one another. Others include those involved in the r-like sounds (taps and trills), and the sibilancy of fricatives.

The concept of manner is mainly used in the discussion of consonants, although the movement of the articulators will also greatly alter the resonant properties of the vocal tract, thereby changing the formant structure of speech sounds that is crucial for the identification of vowels. For consonants, the place of articulation and the degree of phonation or voicing are considered separately from manner, as being independent parameters. Homorganic consonants, which have the same place of articulation, may have different manners of articulation. Often nasality and laterality are included in manner, but some phoneticians, such as Peter Ladefoged, consider them to be independent.

Xiang or Hsiang (Chinese: 湘; Changsha Xiang: [sian˧ y˦˩], Mandarin: [ɕi̯aŋ˥ y˨˩˦]), also known as Hunanese, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages, spoken mainly in Hunan province but also in northern Guangxi and parts of neighboring Guizhou, Guangdong, Sichuan, Jiangxi and Hubei provinces. Scholars divided Xiang into five subgroups: Lou–Shao (Old Xiang), Chang–Yi (New Xiang), Chen–Xu or Ji–Xu, Hengzhou, and Yong–Quan. Among those, Lou–Shao, or Old Xiang, still exhibits the three-way distinction of Middle Chinese obstruents, preserving the voiced stops, fricatives, and affricates. Xiang has also been heavily influenced by Mandarin, which adjoins three of the four sides of the Xiang-speaking territory, and Gan in Jiangxi Province, from where a large population immigrated to Hunan during the Ming dynasty.

Xiang-speaking Hunanese people have played an important role in Modern Chinese history, especially in those reformatory and revolutionary movements such as the Self-Strengthening Movement, Hundred Days' Reform, Xinhai Revolution and Chinese Communist Revolution. Some examples of Xiang speakers are Mao Zedong, Zuo Zongtang, Huang Xing and Ma Ying-jeou.

A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English L, as in Larry. Lateral consonants contrast with median consonants, in which the airstream flows through the center of the mouth.

For the most common laterals, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the upper teeth (see dental consonant) or the upper gum (see alveolar consonant), but there are many other possible places for laterals to be made. The most common laterals are approximants and belong to the class of liquids, but lateral fricatives and affricates are also common in some parts of the world. Some languages, such as the Iwaidja and Ilgar languages of Australia, have lateral flaps, and others, such as the Xhosa and Zulu languages of Africa, have lateral clicks.

An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/, generally spelled ch and j, respectively.

Voiceless alveolar fricatives are a type of fricative consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (gum line) just behind the teeth. This refers to a class of sounds, not a single sound. There are at least six types with significant perceptual differences:

• A voiceless alveolar sibilant [s] (the standard symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA) has a strong hissing sound, as the s in English sink. It is one of the most common sounds in the world.
• A voiceless denti-alveolar sibilant [s̄] (an ad hoc notation), also called apico-dental, has a weaker lisping sound like English th in thin. It occurs in Spanish dialects in southern Spain (eastern Andalusia).
• A voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant [s̠], and the subform apico-alveolar [s̺], or called grave, has a weak hushing sound reminiscent of retroflex fricatives. It is used in the languages of northern Iberia, like Asturleonese, Basque, Peninsular Spanish (excluding parts of Andalusia), Catalan, Galician, and Northern European Portuguese. A similar retracted sibilant form is also used in Dutch, Icelandic, some southern dialects of Swedish, Finnish, and Greek. The retracted "S" is also used in Amerindian languages such as Muscogee, Garifuna, and many varieties of Quechua. It was supposedly the standard sound of s in Classical Latin. Its sound is between [s] and [ʃ].
• A voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠] or [θ͇], using the alveolar diacritic from the Extended IPA, is similar to the th in English thin. It occurs in Icelandic as well as an intervocalic and word-final allophone of English /t/ in dialects such as Hiberno-English and Scouse.
• A voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [ɬ] sounds like a voiceless, strongly articulated version of English l (somewhat like what the English cluster **hl would sound like) and is written as ll in Welsh.

The first three types are sibilants, meaning that they are made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth and have a piercing, perceptually prominent sound.

Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth (the reverse of labiodental), normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants.

The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the English one, in which the nasal and the stops, [m], [p], and [b], are bilabial and the fricatives, [f], and [v], are labiodental. The voiceless bilabial fricative, voiced bilabial fricative, and the bilabial approximant do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds in English, but they occur in many languages. For example, the Spanish consonant written b or v is pronounced, between vowels, as a voiced bilabial approximant.

In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, including English, a distinction between hard and soft ⟨c⟩ occurs in which ⟨c⟩ represents two distinct phonemes. The sound of a hard ⟨c⟩ often precedes the non-front vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩ and ⟨u⟩, and is that of the voiceless velar stop, /k/ (as in car). The sound of a soft ⟨c⟩, typically before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩, may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English (and not coincidentally also French), the sound of soft ⟨c⟩ is /s/ (as in cell).

There was no soft ⟨c⟩ in classical Latin, where it was always pronounced as /k/.

This article discusses the phonological system of Standard Macedonian (unless otherwise noted) based on the Prilep-Bitola dialect. For discussion of other dialects, see Macedonian dialects. Macedonian possesses five vowels, one semivowel, three liquid consonants, three nasal stops, three pairs of fricatives, two pairs of affricates, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops.