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Just what these phonetic values are, Doctor Young pointed out in the case of fourteen characters, representing nine sounds, six of which are accepted to-day as correctly representing the letters to which he ascribed them, and the three others as being correct regarding their essential or consonantal element.
The contact of the lips, or of the lower lip and the teeth. Almost any first-class work on the elements of the English language will give the divisions and the location of the consonantal sounds.
In the verb the principle has as one of its most striking consequences the "aspiration" of initial consonants in the past tense. In modern Irish the principle of consonantal change, which began in the oldest period of the language as a secondary consequence of certain phonetic conditions, has become one of the primary grammatical processes of the language.
A direct and simple process of evolution was alone needed to produce it, and through that evolution man undoubtedly passed in his progress upward from his ancestral stage. The language of the lower animals is a vowel form of speech. It lacks the consonantal elements, the characteristic of articulation. In this man seems to have at first agreed with them.
To interpret well, the singer must have mastered the elocution of singing, must be able to bring out every vowel and consonantal element of the words, must know how to use and apply tone color and tone character, the impressive, persuasive, fervent voice.
In the Athabaskan group many verbs change the quality or quantity of the vowel of the radical element as it changes its tense or mode. In another Indian language, Yokuts , vocalic modifications affect both noun and verb forms. Consonantal change as a functional process is probably far less common than vocalic modifications, but it is not exactly rare.
The positions grade into each other, but each language selects a limited number of clearly defined positions as characteristic of its consonantal system, ignoring transitional or extreme positions. Frequently a language allows a certain latitude in the fixing of the required position.
If we are actually justified in assuming that the expression of all syntactic relations is ultimately traceable to these two unavoidable, dynamic features of speech sequence and stress an interesting thesis results: All of the actual content of speech, its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in origin limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and rhythm.
The device to which we first resort for the understanding and development of articulation, is a study of the three points or places of contact. A vowel sound is the result of an uninterrupted flow of the vibratory air current. A consonantal sound, on the other hand, is the result of a complete obstruction and explosion, of a partial obstruction and explosion, or of a partial obstruction only.
It was the Indians and Greeks who first independently of each other and by very divergent methods created, out of the Aramaean consonantal writing brought to them by commerce, a complete alphabet by the addition of the vowels which was effected by the application of four letters, which the Greeks did not use as consonantal signs, for the four vowels -a -e -i -o, and by the formation of a new sign for -u in other words by the introduction of the syllable into writing instead of the mere consonant, or, as Palamedes says in Euripides,
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