Types of consonants
The consonant is a speech sound in the production of which the air stream coming out of the lungs has to overcome a certain obstruction on its way. The English consonant system consist of 24 consonant phonemes which can be classified as follows:1) According to the types of obstruction (occlusive, constrictives, occlusive-constrictives or affricates); 2)according to the articulatory organ (labial, lingual, pharyngeal); 3)according to the prevalence of noise over the musical tone (noise consonants and sonorants); 4) according to the work of the vocal cords (voiced and voiceless); 5)according to the position of the soft palate (oral and nasal). There are 24 consonant phonemes in English:
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter and its stress patterns. A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.
Syllable structure
In most theories of phonology, the general structure of a syllable consists of three segments: Onset – consonant, obligatory in some languages, optional or even restricted in others; Nucleus – sonorant, obligatory in most languages; Coda – consonant, optional in some languages, highly restricted or prohibited in others. The syllable is usually considered right-branching, that is nucleus and coda are grouped together as a "rime" and are only distinguished at the second level. However, in some traditional descriptions of certain languages, the syllable is considered left-branching, that is onset and nucleus group below a higher-level unit, called a "body" or "core": Rime – right branch, contrasts with onset, splits into nucleus and coda; Body or core – left branch, contrasts with coda, splits into onset and nucleus. In some theories the onset is strictly consonantal, thus necessitating another segment before the nucleus: Initial – often termed onset, but leaving out semi-vowels; Medial – glide between initial, if any, and nucleus or rime; Final – contrasts with initial, extended rime. Although every syllable has supra-segmental features, these are usually ignored if not semantically relevant, that is in tonal languages. Tone – may be carried by the syllable as a whole or by the rime. In some theories of phonology, these syllable structures are displayed as tree diagrams (similar to the trees found in some types of syntax). Not all philologists agree that syllables have internal structure; in fact, some philologists doubt the existence of the syllable as a theoretical entity. The nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and the coda (literally 'tail') is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. They are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda. In the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a (the sound that can be shouted or sung on its own), the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC. Languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a language's phonotactics.
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