Liquid consonant

In phonology, liquids are a class of consonants consisting of voiced lateral approximants like /l/ together with rhotics like /r/. The grammarian Dionysius Thrax used the Ancient Greek word ὑγρός (, ) to describe the sonorant consonants (/l, r, m, n/) of classical Greek. Most commentators assume that this referred to their "slippery" effect on meter in classical Greek verse when they occur as the second member of a consonant cluster. This word was calqued into Latin as liquidus, whence it has been retained in the Western European phonetic tradition. Liquids as a class often behave in a similar way in the phonotactics of a language: for example, they often have the greatest freedom in occurring in consonant clusters. Cross-linguistically, liquids are the consonants most prone to metathesis. In Spanish, /r/ is liable for metathesis. More specifically, /r/ and /l/ frequently switch places: Lat. crocodīlus > Span. cocodrilo “crocodile” Lat. mīrāculum > Span. milagro “miracle” Lat. perīculum > Span. peligro “danger” Lat. parabola > Span. palabra “speech” comfortable is frequently pronounced /ˈkʌmf.tɚ.bəl/ in rhotic varieties, although its stem, comfort is pronounced /ˈkʌm.fɚt/, with the rhotic /ɹ/ in its original position. Liquids are also prone to dissimilation when they occur in sequence. Latin peregrinus > Old French pelegrin (> ) Italian colonello > Middle French coronnel This example of a relatively old case of phonetic dissimilation has been artificially undone in the spelling of English colonel, whose standard pronunciation is /ˈkɝnəl/ (with the r sound) in North-American English, or /ˈkɜːnəl/ in RP. It was formerly spelt coronel and is a borrowing from Middle French coronnel, which arose as a result of dissimilation from Italian colonnello. Liquids are also the consonants most prone to occupying the nucleus slot in a syllable (the slot usually assigned to vowels). Thus Czech and other Slavic languages allow their liquid consonants /l/ and /r/ to be the center of their syllables – as witnessed by the classic tonguetwister strč prst skrz krk "push (your) finger through (your) throat".

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Related concepts (41)

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.

Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech (articulatory phonetics), how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics), or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information (auditory phonetics).

Liquid consonant