| | Consonant - LearnThis.Info Enclyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09) |
 | | A consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. |
| | The word consonant comes from Latin meaning "sounding with" or "sounding together", the idea being that consonants don't sound on their own, but only occur with a nearby vowel, although this conception of consonants does not reflect a modern linguistic understanding of consonants, which defines consonants in terms of vocal tract constrictions. |
| | Since the number of consonants in the world's languages is much greater than the number of consonant letters in most alphabets, linguists have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique symbol to each possible consonant. |
| encyclopedia.learnthis.info /c/co/consonant.html (532 words) |
