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Basic Consonants | Contents |
Shwa has a set of 20 basic consonants formed using four basic shapes, plus a pointy bottom. Since most languages use most of them, and many languages don't need many more consonants, we'll present these basic consonants on this page. Here they are, along with my transcriptions and the IPA symbols for the sounds in their range. As with the vowels, the actual pronunciations can vary between languages.
The columns are organized by place of articulation :
The two righthand columns are both central (and from now on, I'll show them between the coronal and dorsal columns) :
The exact points of articulation can differ from language to language, or even within a language. For example, English p is pronounced with both lips, while f presses the lower lip against the top teeth. Again, what's important is the contrast within the row.
As you can see, all the letters in a column share the same bottom. And all the letters in a row share the same top.
The rows represent manners of articulation. The plosives and affricates trap air behind a blockage; the plosives release it quickly, while the affricates let it out slowly. The fricatives and sibilants channel air through a narrow passage.
Each manner has two rows which differ by voice : each pair has one voiced letter and its unvoiced
counterpart. There's much more to voice than that, but we'll discuss it later.
Most of these consonants are familiar from English :
All the other Shwa consonants are variants of this set, with another shape replacing either the top or the bottom of the letter, or both. But we call these five bottoms the basic bottoms.
Unlike English, Shwa has single letters for the homorganic affricates dz ts dj and ch. But all other affricates have to be written as digraphs - two letters - although they are single sounds. That includes heterorganic affricates like Greek ψ ps or ξ ks (x), non-sibilant affricates like German pf, and lateral affricates as in Navajo dl. In all those cases, Shwa writes them as digraphs: for example, Greek ψ ps is written as p followed by s, as if it were a consonant cluster, even though it actually represents a simple plosive with a sibilant release.
Shwa doesn't even use its affricates to replace a sequence of plosive + sibilant across a syllable or morpheme boundary. So, for instance, the English possessive pronoun its is written with an affricate, while the contraction it's is written as a cluster :
Likewise, English plurals as in cats, possessives as in Matt's and 3rd person singular present verbs like gets are all written as clusters, since the -s is a separate morpheme.
Most languages have nasal phonemes, pronounced by letting air out through your nose as you block your mouth. Shwa has several nasal letters - here are three of them:
They're all pronounced as in English :
• The m sound occurs twice in English mime
• The n sound occurs twice in English noon
• The ng sound occurs twice in English banking. This sound doesn't occur at the beginnings
of syllables in English, but it's not hard to pronounce there.
As you can see, the nasal letters look just like the Shwa letters for b d g, with the top replaced by a nasal
triangle (point upwards).
Lateral consonants like l are also very common in the world's languages, and Shwa has letters for them that use a circle for the top.
The l letter represents the sound we use at the beginning of English syllables, as in low, while the ll letter represents the sound we use at the end of English syllables, as in all. An example using both of them is the word lateral itself:
Rhotic consonants like r use a zigzag top.
In addition to the English wr you met as a semivowel, Shwa has three rhotics that use the basic bottoms:
Normally, each language only uses one of these, but some languages use two, for example Catalan, Portuguese and (here) Spanish :
Shwa has four letters for sounds pronounced using only your glottis : there's no constriction higher in your mouth. They're just phonations being used as consonants. The easiest is the letter h, pronounced just as in English.
Some languages, notably Hindi, Dutch and several Slavic languages (Czech, Ukrainian), have an h pronounced with breathy voicing, which Shwa writes with a different letter which we'll transcribe as hh.
Yet another glottal letter is the glottal stop, which we'll call the Catch and transcribe using the apostrophe '. We use it in English in expressions like uh-oh, or to distinguish between op art and apart or between so I and so why. It occurs in many of the world's languages, for example, Arabic (where it's called hamza), Nahuatl (saltillo) and Hawai'ian ('okina). In Japanese, most utterances begin and end with a Catch.
In French, a Catch is used at the beginning of words to indicate that the word doesn't form liaison with the preceding word, the role now played by the h aspiré:
We sometimes use a Catch within a word to indicate some separation, but less separation than a space - in other words, to link words more closely than a space permits. This is the role played in English by the hyphen, the underscore and even the dot in our dot.com era.
Finally, Shwa has an entirely silent letter, which we'll call the Break and transcribe using the period . . It generally represents the start of a new syllable.
For example, the Break can be used to indicate an unexpected break between syllables:
More commonly, in many languages, the Break is used as a null initial, a silent consonant at the beginning of a syllable that starts with a vowel.
Whether you use the null initial or not depends on the language, but here is a rule of thumb:
The letters you've already met are Shwa's basic letters. Here they are again :
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