Stop consonant in the context of "Uvular consonant"

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 phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majority of consonants are oral consonants. Examples of nasals in English are [n], [ŋ] and [m], in words such as nose, bring and mouth.

Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages. There are also other kinds of nasal consonants in some languages.

Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can be modified by phonation. Contrastive implosives are found in approximately 13% of the world's languages.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, implosives are indicated by modifying the top of a letter (voiced stop) with a rightward-facing hook: bilabial ⟨ɓ⟩, alveolar ⟨ɗ ⟩, retroflex ⟨ᶑ ⟩ (this letter is 'implicit' in the IPA), palatal ⟨ ʄ ⟩, velar ⟨ɠ ⟩ and uvular ⟨ʛ ⟩.

A syllabic consonant, or vocalic consonant, is a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable on its own, like the m, n and l in some pronunciations of the English words rhythm, button and awful, respectively. To represent it, the understroke diacritic in the International Phonetic Alphabet is used, ⟨U+0329 ◌̩ COMBINING VERTICAL LINE BELOW⟩. It may be instead represented by an overstroke, ⟨U+030D ◌̍ COMBINING VERTICAL LINE ABOVE⟩ if the symbol that it modifies has a descender, such as in [ŋ̍].

Syllabic consonants in most languages are sonorants, such as nasals and liquids. Very few have syllabic obstruents (i.e., stops, fricatives, and affricates) in normal words, but English has syllabic fricatives in paralinguistic words like shh! and zzz.

English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the worldwide dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants (stops, affricates, and fricatives).

Phonological analysis of English often concentrates on prestige or standard accents, such as Received Pronunciation for England, General American for the United States, and General Australian for Australia. Nevertheless, many other dialects of English are spoken, which have developed differently from these standardized accents, particularly regional dialects. Descriptions of standardized reference accents provide only a limited guide to the phonology of other dialects of English.

Lower Yangtze Mandarin (traditional Chinese: 下江官話; simplified Chinese: 下江官话; pinyin: Xiàjiāng Guānhuà) is one of the most divergent and least mutually-intelligible of the Mandarin language varieties, as it neighbours the Wu, Hui, and Gan groups of Sinitic languages. It is also known as Jiang–Huai Mandarin (traditional Chinese: 江淮官話; simplified Chinese: 江淮官话; pinyin: Jiānghuái Guānhuà), named after the Yangtze (Jiang) and Huai Rivers. Lower Yangtze is distinguished from most other Mandarin varieties by the retention of a final glottal stop in words that ended in a stop consonant in Middle Chinese.

During the Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty, the lingua franca of administration was based on Lower Yangtze Mandarin. In the 19th century the base shifted to the Beijing dialect.

Ancient Greek phonology is the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek. This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier. The pronunciation of Ancient Greek is not known from direct observation, but determined from other types of evidence. Some details regarding the pronunciation of Attic Greek and other Ancient Greek dialects are unknown, but it is generally agreed that Attic Greek had certain features not present in English or Modern Greek, such as a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops (such as /b p pʰ/, as in English "bot, spot, pot"); a distinction between single and double consonants and short and long vowels in most positions in a word; and a word accent that involved pitch.

Koine Greek, the variety of Greek used after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, is sometimes included in Ancient Greek, but its pronunciation is described in Koine Greek phonology. For disagreements with the reconstruction given here, see below.

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.

In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are sonorants, as are semivowels like [j] and [w], nasal consonants like [m] and [n], and liquid consonants like [l] and [r]. This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents (stops, affricates and fricatives).

For some authors, only the term resonant is used with this broader meaning, while sonorant is restricted to the consonantal subset—that is, nasals and liquids only, not vocoids (vowels and semivowels).