English Consonants

Consonants are a complete or partial closure of the flow of breath or voice. For example, they may stop the air or voice, as you hear at the beginning and ending of a word like pop. They may disturb the airflow with friction or turbulence, such as the consonant sound used at the start and end of shush. Or they can send the voice stream through the nose instead of the mouth, as you can hear, and feel by touching your nose, on a word like man. (Try saying it while plugging your nose with your index finger and thumb!) The opposite of consonants are the vowels, which are unconstricted voiced sound which is shaped into different resonance characteristics by the tongue, the lips and, to a lesser extent, the soft palate and pharynx (or back of the throat). Unvoiced vowels are what we call “whispering.”

The symbols used to represent consonants are, for the most part, quite easy to learn. Many of the ipa symbols are easily associated with their corresponding sound because the symbol is exactly the same letter used in spelling. For example, the <f, s, t> in the word fast are represented by the symbols [f, s, t] in the ipa.  However, there are many letters that we use in spelling that have more than one sound associated with them. In this case, we need to learn which symbol is connected to which sound. There are also some sounds in English spelling which require more than one letter to represent a single sound (e.g. The two letters of “sh” represent only one sound, and are represented by the single symbol [ʃ] ), while there are some letters that represent more than one sound (e.g. <x> whose two sounds are represented by the symbols [ks]). This is where knowing the ipa seems to be a real advantage—when you encounter a new word, or one of foreign origin, you can easily write it out so that you are never again unsure of how to pronounce it.