In my post about phonetics I said that the four basic pulmonic manners of articulation are stops, nasals, fricatives, and approximants. Here I'm going to completely recant that and explain why it's not that simple. The first step is to look at what each of those mean.
I defined a stop as a sound in which oral airflow is completely blocked. While this is true, this can hardly tell the whole picture of the sound. What happens after the stop can do as much to characterize the phone as the stop itself. Enter affricates, sounds formed when a stop is fricated for a moment after release, like the "ch" sound /tʃ/. In essence, whatever is blocking the airflow opens enough to let airthrough, but the airstream is still very narrow and turbulent and sounds like a fricative before completely opening before allowing the next sound to be pronounced. The issue is that this can be difficult to distinguish from phenomena that wouldn't make a stop considered anything but a normal stop. Aspiration or positioning of the tongue can make the moment of a stop's release turbulent. For instance, in Danish the aspirated alveolar stop is /tˢ/, pronounced with a slight frication upon release. Similarly, Japanese /t/ is pronounced [ts] before /u/ because the vowel height causes the consonant to be sulcalized, or pronounced with the midline of the tongue depressed, causing a characteristic sibilant, or hissing, release. In practice, affricates tend to be very rare at any place of articulation except coronals for the simple reason that affricates often just don't sound very distinct from stops. Coronals are the exception because of the distinctive sulcalization that they may undergo.
The other thing to consider is that what I call nasals actually fit the definition of stops. That is, nasals also don't allow airflow through the mouth. This is because nasals in the conventional sense of the word are more precisely nasalized stops, where nasalization refers to the fact that the nasal passages are opened. As stated in the phonetics post, each component involved in speech acts in relative independence from others, and nasalization simply refers to the opening of the nasal passages during pronunciation. The reason that nasalized consonants are almost always stops has to do with sounding distinct, as usual. If air is allowed to flow through the mouth as in a fricative, the air flowing through the nose becomes relatively insignificant in its effect upon the sound. However, the difference in sound between a nasalized and non-nasalized stop is tremendous. By allowing for air flow through the nose, a nasal can be pronounced with continuous airflow, unlike a stop where air is completely halted. The most salient sound becomes that of air going through the nose, rather than of air being released after the oral stop. For this reason, nasalized stops are usually retained as a separate series of sounds. Counterintuitively, the only other sounds that are commonly nasalized are vowels.
Lastly, there's the messy fact that the difference between fricatives and approximants, or between approximants and vowels, is not always clear-cut. Each of these refers to a differing level of openness of the mouth, but the fact is that the exact level of openness that corresponds to, say, a fricative rather than an approximant, is rather inexact. The standard definition of frication is turbulence between two articulators situated close to one another. However, frication is often not distinctive within phonological boundaries, and fricatives and approximants may run together into a single phoneme. For instance, in Spanish the approximant /j/ is often pronounced as the fricative [ʝ], and corresponds in the phonology to fricatives at other places of articulation. The difference between high vowels and certain approximants, while usually a strict phonemic distinction in the sense that they are treated very differently in syllables, can be minor. X-ray analysis shows that approximants tend to be pronounced closer than vowels, but only barely so.
The simplification of splitting consonants into stops, fricatives, approximants, and nasals is a pragmatic one, and works to explain phonology most of the time. For good reasons, languages tend to split up their consonants that way, but hopefully this post is an insight into the way consonants really work, and why that simplified model just isn't always so.
I defined a stop as a sound in which oral airflow is completely blocked. While this is true, this can hardly tell the whole picture of the sound. What happens after the stop can do as much to characterize the phone as the stop itself. Enter affricates, sounds formed when a stop is fricated for a moment after release, like the "ch" sound /tʃ/. In essence, whatever is blocking the airflow opens enough to let airthrough, but the airstream is still very narrow and turbulent and sounds like a fricative before completely opening before allowing the next sound to be pronounced. The issue is that this can be difficult to distinguish from phenomena that wouldn't make a stop considered anything but a normal stop. Aspiration or positioning of the tongue can make the moment of a stop's release turbulent. For instance, in Danish the aspirated alveolar stop is /tˢ/, pronounced with a slight frication upon release. Similarly, Japanese /t/ is pronounced [ts] before /u/ because the vowel height causes the consonant to be sulcalized, or pronounced with the midline of the tongue depressed, causing a characteristic sibilant, or hissing, release. In practice, affricates tend to be very rare at any place of articulation except coronals for the simple reason that affricates often just don't sound very distinct from stops. Coronals are the exception because of the distinctive sulcalization that they may undergo.
The other thing to consider is that what I call nasals actually fit the definition of stops. That is, nasals also don't allow airflow through the mouth. This is because nasals in the conventional sense of the word are more precisely nasalized stops, where nasalization refers to the fact that the nasal passages are opened. As stated in the phonetics post, each component involved in speech acts in relative independence from others, and nasalization simply refers to the opening of the nasal passages during pronunciation. The reason that nasalized consonants are almost always stops has to do with sounding distinct, as usual. If air is allowed to flow through the mouth as in a fricative, the air flowing through the nose becomes relatively insignificant in its effect upon the sound. However, the difference in sound between a nasalized and non-nasalized stop is tremendous. By allowing for air flow through the nose, a nasal can be pronounced with continuous airflow, unlike a stop where air is completely halted. The most salient sound becomes that of air going through the nose, rather than of air being released after the oral stop. For this reason, nasalized stops are usually retained as a separate series of sounds. Counterintuitively, the only other sounds that are commonly nasalized are vowels.
Lastly, there's the messy fact that the difference between fricatives and approximants, or between approximants and vowels, is not always clear-cut. Each of these refers to a differing level of openness of the mouth, but the fact is that the exact level of openness that corresponds to, say, a fricative rather than an approximant, is rather inexact. The standard definition of frication is turbulence between two articulators situated close to one another. However, frication is often not distinctive within phonological boundaries, and fricatives and approximants may run together into a single phoneme. For instance, in Spanish the approximant /j/ is often pronounced as the fricative [ʝ], and corresponds in the phonology to fricatives at other places of articulation. The difference between high vowels and certain approximants, while usually a strict phonemic distinction in the sense that they are treated very differently in syllables, can be minor. X-ray analysis shows that approximants tend to be pronounced closer than vowels, but only barely so.
The simplification of splitting consonants into stops, fricatives, approximants, and nasals is a pragmatic one, and works to explain phonology most of the time. For good reasons, languages tend to split up their consonants that way, but hopefully this post is an insight into the way consonants really work, and why that simplified model just isn't always so.
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