More Consonants

Chapter 3 covered the consonants of English. The IPA chart is much bigger, because the world's languages use places and airstreams that English never touches. This chapter does not ask you to memorise them all; it shows you how to read them using the same voicing, place and manner recipe.

New Places, Same Recipe

Chapter 2 listed all the places from front to back with one example symbol each. Several of them are absent from English consonants but familiar from other languages.

The Hungarian palatal examples are the ones you met in Chapter 1: gy = [ɟ] is from Wikipedia's Hungarian phonology article, and ty = [c] follows the same pattern.

Changing the Airstream

Chapter 2 named three airstream "pistons". Pulmonic (lungs) covers everything so far. The other two give three families of non-pulmonic consonants.

Ejectives: glottalic egressive

An ejective is "usually voiceless", made with a glottalic egressive airstream. The glottis closes and rises (the hyoid bone is lifted by the stylohyoid and digastric muscles), the mouth is closed, so pressure builds in the mouth, and when the articulators separate there is a burst of air. Ejectives are often weak, and can be hard to tell apart from ordinary voiceless or voiced stops.

Notation: a modifier apostrophe [ʼ] after the symbol. Examples from Wikipedia: stops [pʼ tʼ kʼ qʼ], affricates [tsʼ tʃʼ], fricatives [sʼ ʃʼ], lateral [tɬʼ]. Languages with ejectives include Georgian, Chechen, Quechua, Hausa, Zulu, Tlingit and Amharic.

Implosives: glottalic ingressive

In an implosive the glottis moves down during the stop, which rarefies the air in the mouth, while air is also pushed up from the lungs. Most implosives are voiced; the page notes that many involve no real inward rush of air, so they are phonetically sonorants. Voiceless implosives use a purely glottalic ingressive airstream with the glottis closed.

Each is a voiced stop with a rightward-facing hook. Sindhi and Saraiki contrast [ɓ ᶑ ʄ ɠ]; in Swahili implosives are non-contrastive allophones of voiced stops. Voiceless implosives are written with a voiceless diacritic ([ɓ̥]); in 1993 the IPA withdrew its separate letters for them, and some authors still use the old ones.

Clicks: lingual ingressive

Clicks use a lingual ingressive airstream: the tongue sucks air into a pocket between two closures, one at the front and one at the back, and the front closure is then released. Clicks occur in many Southern African languages and in three East African languages: Sandawe, Hadza and Dahalo.

Zulu and Xhosa write clicks with the letters c, q and x. Hadza and Sandawe have three click types: [ǀ], [ǁ] and [ǃ]. You already make something like clicks: the "tut-tut" or "tsk tsk" of disapproval is a dental click, and the "tchick" used to spur on a horse is a lateral click. Wikipedia adds that these English sounds are not full click consonants, because they lack the back release needed to combine with vowels.

Try It Yourself