Consonant

In standard Czech the vowels represented with <y> and <i> are pronounced identically. However, in my dialect <y> is a separate vowel that is pronounced like something between the vowels <i> and <e>.

Vowels in standard Czech are either short or long, their duration can change the meaning of a word. However, in my dialect there's no difference between long and short vowels.

Is there a specific reason that we know of? possibly influence of pre-existing local languages? did this process take place in other non-official romance languages (since it didn't seem to happen in the official ones i know)?

bonus question: do we know how far back this process dates?

Why

Why did ancient Greeks determine that those 2 consonant clusters were deserving of their own letters but not any other cluster like [st], [pr], [kl], [pn], etc? The 4 I just mentioned can also occur word-initially just like [ps] and [ks] do. Did ancient Greeks actually believe that those 2 clusters were single sounds?

Strangely enough, they never invented or utilized a letter for the actual affricate [ts], which is present even in modern Greek.

So this question is relevant to me also because I am learning other Indian languages. There is a common consonant in Indian languages that I, growing up speaking English, have no idea how to pronounce. In Sanskrit there are 3 consonants involving the s sound. One is equal to the English s. The second is equal to the “sh” sound in English. But the 3rd, which we write a romanized characters as ś, I have no idea how to pronounce. The best I have heard is that you must keep the lips open and the tongue to the root of the bottom teeth. How do you pronounce this letter?

*gender neutral or masc, can lean fem a teeny bit tho

what i mean by the last bit btw is has a closed sound like laMP or veNT not something like tea or pillow (im just naming things i see around me sry lol)

i see most people here especially native english speakers who are learning russian have a problem with soft consonants but for me it's the opposite. i can't pronounce hard consonants properly while speaking with people, i need to pay attention to my tongue position and speak really slowly to get it right but i can't speak to native speakers like that.

my native language is Arabic and that's the problem, in arabic most of the consonants sounds soft naturally and hard pronunciation will need efforts, there are hard consonants in arabic but they're so different from russian or english, they aren't used in any European language at all so they can't be applied here.

i didn't care about that when i learned english because there is no soft-hard consonants issue in english, but now i pay attention to that in russian and then realized why i as an arab have this funny and weird accent while speaking english, because of that consonants pronunciation i guess.

i started practicing russian with an Ukrainian friend of mine recently and she told me about that and she got confused by many words, it was a bit embarrassing for me.

i think i need more and more practice to solve this issue but how i can speak freely without paying close attention to my mouth and tongue all time? it feels a bit daunting

I've been toying around with trying to create a simple consonant harmony system. I'm aware of RegEx lookaheads and so forth, but I'm not sure if/how to do that as a phonological rule. The basic structure I'm aiming for is that for consonants that have voiced/unvoiced pairs, the voicing must match across any given word. If there is a way to use a lookahead like system I'll probably see if there are ways to expand upon that later on, but that might end up being too complicated depending on how it works so I wanted to start simple.

So, I have a question about the reconstruction of PIE consonants.

According to the Etmological Dictionaries, the words "rape" and "raven" have the same PIE root *ker- however how did "k" change into "r"? I'd love to know if somebody could explain. Thank you in advance.

Let me first list what the whole alphabet should be: an A, a B, a C, a D, an E, an F, a G, an H, an I, a J, a K, an L, an M, an N, an O, a P, a Q, an R, an S, a T, a U (this one is the really tricky outlier, will get to that later), a V, a W, an X, a Y, a Z.

okay, so my reason I'm pissed. Letters, when said individually, spell out multiple letter words phonetically. "Ayy", "Bee", "Sea", "Dee", "Eee", etc (if you want to get really technical, they'd be spelled with accented characters). With that said, when you're talking about a specific thing, the identifier ( *this probably isn't the proper word....I'm not an English major* ) you use is based on the first letter of that word. If it's a consonant, you use "a". If it's a vowel, you use "an". This rule extends to letters. Letters have a pronunciation the same as whole words do.

Now, about that sneaky little trickster, U. As we know, U is a vowel, and so any words that start with "u" would be identified by "an", (an ulcer, an ultimatum, etc). However, when we pronounce the letter U, it sounds like the word "yew" which uses the letter Y as a consonant sound instead of a vowel sound (y in a vowel sound would be something like "healthy"). Therefore, U is the only vowel which is identified with "a" instead of "an."

this was cathartic, thank you.

Edit: aight, everyone that's ragging on me about words using a or an, that's not what I'm on about. I'm talking about individual letters.

Edit 2: people still not understanding I'm not talking about words. I'm referring to individual letters, like you're calling out a letter on wheel of fortune. "can I buy an A"

Apparently in some languages there are words that are just long strings of consonants. How would someone yell these words?

What would a language with only fricative consonants look like? Would it be human-usable? Would there be any chance of evolution of changes in mouth shape due to a phonology like this? I’ve been thinking on this since hearing the Snakey Language in Harry Potter, where theres just a whole bunch of voiceless fricatives, mostly centered on the palate and alveolar ones. And would an emphasis on front vowels further sharpen the sound of this theorized language?

Also, on the tangent of snakey languages, what other consonant types might be reasonably expected in a language aimed at snakeness? Would a talking snake use nasal sounds at all? Perhaps a nice trilled rhotic?

(P.s. please forgive my misuse of terms and general disorganization. I have no idea what i’m talking about. I am often misinformed.)

I just started to learn Finnish grammar about 2 months after learning new words, and I come across "maailma", as in "world", but I also know "maailmalle", which means it is shortened from "lt" or "rt", according to the video.

I tried to add these suffixes on the google translate and came back with "maailmalt", as in "from the world", and "maailmart", as in "world map". Considering "maailmalle" is "to the world", would "maailmalt" be the gradated answer? Hope this makes sense.

When placed in the first consonant position, it doesn't get pronounced, however it’s a placeholder for following vowels to come.

In the word “อ่าง” you only pronounce the าง part of the word + the tonal marker.

When placed in the vowel position, it gets pronounced as /ɔ/ (For those who don't know know IPA, it is pronounced like the "aw" in "Saw").

Oxford dictionaries mention that a consonant is “a speech sound made by completely or partly stopping the flow of air through the mouth or nose” and that a vowel is “a speech sound in which the mouth is open and the tongue is not touching the top of the mouth, the teeth, etc., so that the flow of air is not limited, for example /ɑː, e, ɔː/”

Basically:

• To pronounce a consonant, you close your mouth
• To pronounce a vowel, you open your mouth

Despite not following the rule of being a consonants, why is "อ" considered a consonant?

I know that people here have knowledge of Thai and I didn’t have to explain all of this for you, but I made this not to be able to find the answer myself, but rather also for others to find the answer.

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e ouio o iiie ee oe e eiei o ou i e uu ie ie. I ie o ee ie. i oo oe i ie ou e ou o. ou ie oiue o e ue o eeio, i ou ie, ee i , o' oi oe. i i e ...