Basic Consonants

Musa has a set of 20 basic consonants formed using four basic shapes, plus a pointy bottom. Since most languages use most of them, and many languages don't need many more consonants, we'll present these basic consonants on this page. Here they are, along with my transcriptions and the IPA symbols for the sounds in their range. As with the vowels, the actual pronunciations can vary between languages.

The columns are organized by position of articulation :

• The labials are pronounced with the lips.
• The coronals are pronounced with the front of the tongue against the teeth and gums.
• The dorsals are pronounced with the back of the tongue against the roof of the mouth.

We use the term position of articulation in favor of the more common place of articulation, because in several cases two articulations occur in the same place, but with the articulators positioned differently. For example, retroflex and palatal consonants differ more in the shape of the tongue than in the identity of the two articulators.

The two righthand columns are both central (and from now on, I'll show them between the coronal and dorsal columns) :

• The hissing sounds are produced by directing a jet of air against the back of the teeth.
• The hushing sounds differ in being pronounced with a groove in the center of your tongue.

The exact points of articulation can differ from language to language, or even within a language. For example, the hushing sounds can be laminal, apical or subapical - what's important is the contrast within the row.

As you can see, all the letters in a column share the same bottom, while all the letters in a row share the same top. The rows represent manners of articulation. The plosives and affricates trap air behind a blockage; the plosives release it quickly, while the affricates let it out slowly. The fricatives and sibilants channel air through a narrow passage.

Each manner has two rows which differ by voice : each pair has one voiced letter and its unvoiced counterpart. There's much more to voice than that, but we'll discuss it later.

Most of these consonants are familiar from English :

• b d g p t k z s are pronounced as in English
  g is always pronounced as in go, never as in gem
  s is always pronounced as in see, never as in rose
  The dz sound occurs in English adze or ads
  The dj sound occurs twice in English judge
  The ts sound occurs in English its
  The ch sound occurs twice in English church
  The dh sound occurs twice in English this weather
  The th sound occurs twice in English thin path
  The zh sound occurs in English measure
  The sh sound occurs twice in English sheepish
  The dz, ts and zh sounds don't occur in initial position in English, but they're not hard to pronounce there.

• The labial fricatives bh and ph don't occur in English, but they're very similar to English v and f. The difference is that as you pronounce the English sounds, your lower lip is against your upper teeth, while the Musa letters represent sounds made with both lips, as in the Spanish word haber.

• The dorsal fricatives don't occur in English at all.
  gh occurs in Arabic, Greek, Hindi and many other languages.
  kh occurs in German Bach and Dutch (but not Flemish) Gent, and in Scots, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese and many other languages.

All the other Musa consonants are variants of this set, with another shape replacing either the top or the bottom of the letter, or both. But we call these five bottoms the basic bottoms.

Affricates

Unlike English, Musa has single letters for the homorganic sibilant affricates dz ts dj and ch and several more you'll meet below. But most other affricates have to be written as digraphs - two letters - although they are single sounds. That includes heterorganic affricates like Greek ψ ps or ξ ks and non-sibilant homorganic affricates like German pf. In all those cases, Musa writes them as digraphs: for example, Greek ψ ps is written as p followed by s, as if it were a consonant cluster, even though it actually represents a simple plosive with a sibilant release. Musa Ligature fonts have ligatures for the non-sibilant homorganic affricates.

Musa uses its affricate letters to replace a sequence of plosive + sibilant in the same syllable within a word. So, for instance, the English possessive pronoun its is written with an affricate, but the contraction it's - a contraction of it is or it has - is written with a t and an s, separated by a space. Likewise, English plurals as in cats or beds, possessives as in Matt's or Ted's and 3rd person singular present verbs like chats or spreads are all written with affricate letters. Only if the plosive is in a different syllable from the sibilant, as in words like bootstrap, do we write them with two letters - the first is held.

Nasal Consonants

Most languages have nasal phonemes, pronounced by letting air out through your nose as you block your mouth. Musa has several nasal letters - here are three of them. As you can see, m n ng look just like the Musa letters for b d g, with the top replaced by a nasal triangle (pointing upwards).

They're all pronounced as in English :
• The m sound occurs twice in English mime
• The n sound occurs twice in English noon
• The ng sound occurs twice in English banking. This sound doesn't occur at the beginnings of syllables in English, but it's not hard to pronounce.

Lateral Consonants

Lateral consonants like l are also very common in the world's languages, and Musa has letters for them that use an arch shape for the top that supposed to make you think of a tongue, because lateral consonants feature your tongue pushed up to block the center of your mouth.

The l letter represents the "clear l" we use at the beginning of English syllables, as in low, while the ll letter represents the velarized "dark l" we use at the end of English syllables, as in all. An example using both of them is the word lateral itself:

We also use the Musa letter for dark l to spell the rare velar l, in those languages that need it. The two sound quite alike, and as far as I know never contrast.

Rhotic Consonants

Rhotic consonants like r use a zigzag top.

In addition to the English  you met as a semivowel, Musa has two common rhotics:

• the tap r used in Turkish, Basque, Tagalog, Hindi and single r in Spanish and Portuguese
• the trill rr used in Russian, Arabic, Italian and Spanish rr

Most languages use only one of these, but some languages use both, for example Catalan, Portuguese and (here) Spanish :

Glottal Consonants

Musa has letters for sounds pronounced using only your glottis : there's no constriction higher in your mouth. They're just phonations being used as consonants.

The easiest is the letter h, pronounced just as in English. Some languages, for example Hindi, Dutch and several Slavic languages (Czech, Ukrainian), pronounce the h with breathy voicing, which Musa writes with a different letter.

The other glottal letter is the glottal stop, which we'll call the Catch and transcribe using the apostrophe '. We use it in English in expressions like uh-oh, or to distinguish between op art and apart or between so I and so why. It occurs in many of the world's languages, for example, Arabic (where it's called hamza), Nahuatl (saltillo) and Hawai'ian (ʻokina).

Musa also has a letter for the very rare epiglottal stop, the sound you make when you shut your larynx completely, for instance while swallowing. Some languages actually use it in speech!



Break

We use a vertical line within a word to indicate an unexpected syllable break, as in English words like ward.robe versus tear.drop. This is the role played in English by the hyphen, the underscore and even the dot in our dot.com era. We call it the Break.

Unlike the Catch or the  semivowel, with which it's sometimes confused, the Break has no sound of its own - it's just an orthographic symbol. But it does affect pronunciation.

	
append	upend
	
nitrate	night-rate
	
contrary	cartwright
	
eardrum	boardroom

Even though the second word in the first three examples features a held fortis plosive, the Break makes it much clearer what's going on, and in the last example, it's the only thing preventing us from pronouncing the second word as boar-droom.

The Break is also used to write hiatus between consecutive vowels when no consonant separates them, as in words like English drawing, and to spell a missing final in languages with fixed syllable structure, like Chinese. Since the Break is a consonant, the end result is that in Musa no two vowels are written consecutively.

Geminate and Held (Unreleased) Consonants

Geminate (doubled) consonants appear in many languages, and differ from single consonants, as in Italian fatto versus fato. Musa writes them simply by writing the consonant twice, as we do in the Roman alphabet (not as they do in Arabic script or Japanese kana). If the doubled consonant is a fortis plosive, we write the first one as held. For most consonants, the geminate version is simply held longer, but for stops, it's the pause between closure and release that is prolonged - neither is repeated.

Likewise, in a cluster of two plosives or nasals, most often the first one is held (and the second has no approach phase). The articulators move into the first position, the airstream is blocked, they move to the second position, and the airstream is released. This is normal, and doesn't have to be written in Musa, but if the first consonant is a fortis plosive, we write it as held.

If the geminate - or any blockage between consonants - is held longer, like a missing vowel, we write it with a long mark, as mentioned on the Vowel page. That's the case, for example, in Japanese, where the moraic obstruent is as long as other mora.

But consider a word like night-owl: the t is definitely separated from the o - it's not nigh-towel. But the t isn't released, as if they were two separate words. In fact, it's as if the t was the first of two consecutive consonants, it's just that the second consonant is missing. So we write a Break as the missing second consonant:


night-owl

Consonant Recap

The letters you've already met are Musa's 62 basic letters. Here they are again :

< Vowels

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