CONSONANT AND VOWEL SOUNDS CONTRASTED

                      CONSONANT  AND  VOWEL  SOUNDS  CONTRASTED

Almost  all speakers  have an  intuitive understanding of the difference between  consonants and vowels, though they  may not be able always to express in it technical terms.  The  vowels are the resonant, open sounds, and the consonants are the sounds that  are characterized by short duration, lack of sonority or a predominance of friction noise  in their make up, or by  various combinations of these features.  In others words, the speech tract is relatively unimpeded in the pronunciation of vowels, while there is always some kind of restriction or closure in the pronunciation of consonants.

All languages seem to have  a feature that can  be called a syllable, and again most speakers have an intuitive understanding of what  a syllables is, or how many syllables a given  word contains, even though a technically  accurate definition of the syllable is extremely difficult.   In English, almost all syllables contain a vowel; the only ones that do not are those like the second syllables of baffle and button, in which “syllabic” l and n are the only sounds.  These consonants, belonging  to a group usually called resonants, are of such nature  that they can be prolonged and can function as the only sound in a syllable.  (In phonemic analysis such syllables are considered to consist of a vowel followed by a consonant; actually, of course, in phonemic terms, the consonant amd the vowel, if there is one, are pronunced simultaneously).  More will be said on this point later.

There are also sounds like the first  sounds in year or we, which  clearly give a consonantal impression to speakers of English  but which, in  phonetic terms, resemble vowels more than consonats,  Such sounds are usually called semiconsonants and will be discussed separately.