More Positions

On the previous pages, you met 62 basic letters. But there are many more than 62 sounds in all the world's languages; many single languages have more sounds than that! To write most of the sounds in all of the world's languages, Musa replaces the tops or bottoms of some consonants to create more letters.

In English, we only use three general positions of articulation, and most languages use the same three:

But there are other positions of articulation used in many languages, and Musa has bottoms for them:

Labiodental Letters

On the last page, you met the bilabial fricatives bh and ph, which are made between your two lips. They're relatively rare, although for example bh occurs in Spanish and ph in Japanese. More languages have, instead, labiodental v and f, made between your upper teeth and lower lip. Ewe (Èʋegbe), a language of Ghana and Togo, has both sets: bilabial β and Φ and labiodental v and f, written with a hook on the bottom:

Musa also has letters for labiodental stops, oral and nasal, even though those sounds only occur allophonically or in affricates:

In addition, Musa has a letter for a labiodental approximant, a sound which appears in several languages; it's written ʋ in IPA . To pronounce it, put your mouth in position to say v, but say w instead.

Musa has several more letters for approximants that share the same circular top as the lateral approximants you met on the last page, even though they're not lateral.

Labial-Velar Letters

A square bottom is used for labial-velar sounds, as found in many West African languages : kp and gb (as in the name of the Nigerian language Igbo), ejective kpʼ, and nasal ŋm. They're not clusters - the two sounds are pronounced simultaneously.

More Bilabial Letters

In addition to the basic bilabial letters, there are letters for bilabial sounds written with the zigzag top, even though they're not rhotic. Kom has a bilabial trill, not to be confused with the labiodental flap of Mangbetu :

This last letter is also used for bilabial flaps in some languages, so it could be called simply a labial flap.

Musa also has a letter for a bilabial approximant, like w but with no velarization:

Retroflex Letters

The retroflex letters use the or bottoms. They're used in almost all of the languages of India, and in many other languages. For retroflex sounds, the tongue should be flat, concave or even curled upwards, to contrast with the palatal sounds, for which the tongue is pushed upwards to fill the mouth. There are retroflex versions of the plosives d t with sharp bottoms, and of the sonorants n l with smooth bottoms:

The sharp retroflex bottom is used for the common retroflex flap, while the rare retroflex trill uses a smooth retroflex bottom:

Retroflex affricates and sibilants use a rounded bottom (as do almost all affricates and sibilants).

That last letter also spells the northern pronunciation of Swedish sj.

On the Consonants page, I mentioned that letters for affricates replace stop+sibilant, even across morphemes; cat's and cats are spelled alike. But in cases where the stop and the sibilant have different positions, we write them differently. In the second Polish example below, we would combine them if the t were also retroflex.

Palatal Letters

Like the retroflex consonants, palatals also use two different bottoms: a sharp one for plosives, fricatives, and taps or flaps, and a smooth one for affricates, sibilants, trills, nasals, and laterals.

Many Romance languages have palatal ns, as in Italian Spagna, French Espagne, Catalan Espanya, Spanish España and Portuguese Espanha. In Musa, those palatal ns are written using a letter with the nasal triangle on top and a closed arch on the bottom:

Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan also still have the palatal ly (spelled as gl, lh and ll), although this sound has disappeared from French and from most Spanish dialects leaving just the semivowel y. (Many textbooks describe this sound as being the one from English million, but that's not correct : it's a y with your tongue pressed firmly against the roof of your mouth.)

The palatal ly isn't the same as the palatalized l. The two sounds contrast in Italian:

In German, when the dorsal fricative kh (written ch) follows a front vowel, it becomes palatal, as in the words ich and nicht, but not Nacht. This is called ich-Laut :

Hungarian has unusual palatal plosives, ty and gy. Czech spells them t' and d', or more commonly t and d before i.

Alveolo-palatal affricates and sibilants use a rounded bottom:

A note on the use of retroflex and palatal sibilants: when a language has only two series, like English z s ("hissing") and zh sh ("hushing"), then they can be written   and   without worrying too much about the exact articulation of the back series. But when a language has three series, the two back series usually contrast retroflex and palatal. We would write   for the "hissing" series,   for the "rustling" series, and   for the "humming" series. The corresponding affricates work the same way.

In Chinese, the velar plosives g and k have softened to palatal affricates (pinyin j q) before front i ue y and yw, and the velar fricative kh (pinyin h) has become a palatal sibilant (pinyin x), and we write all three of them with palatal letters. These contrast with both hissing dz ts s (pinyin z c s) and rustling dj ch sh (pinyin zh ch sh) :

Polish and several other Slavic languages also contrast three series of affricates/sibilants, for which we use the hissing, rustling, and humming letters. The humming series is soft; it incorporates the soft round suffix you'll meet on the Suffixes page:

Here's a full list of palatal letters :

Uvular Letters

Arabic ق has a famous uvular sound, the qāf in names like Iraq and Qatar. The Quechua languages also distinguish a uvular q from a velar k. Musa has five other uvular letters as well, used for sounds further back in your mouth than velar. Here they all are :

The uvular r is one of the many realizations of the guttural r, a phoneme in several languages whose exact pronunciation varies to include fricatives and unvoiced allophones.

Pharyngeal Letters

There are also sounds articulated between your uvula and your glottis, deep in your throat, like the sounds of the Arabic letters ع ayn and ح heh.

It used to be thought that there were two positions of articulation in the root of your throat, pharyngeal and epiglottal (also known as upper and lower pharyngeal). But now, linguists have decided that the only contrastive sounds - fricatives - actually contrast in manner, not position, since epiglottal fricatives are actually trills. So Musa doesn't distinguish pharyngeal from epiglottal sounds.

Lateral Letters

Musa has letters for coronal lateral fricatives, as occur in Welsh, Zulu, Navajo and Tlingit, for example:

The same bottom is used for lateral affricates, as in the unvoiced lateral affricate tl (from Navajo and Tlingit), the voiced lateral affricate dlz (from Oowekyala) and the lateral flap (from Venda or Japanese).

Lateral fricatives and affricates in other positions of articulation are written as digraphs. The first letter is one of the letters above with a circle bottom - showing the manner and phonation - while the second letter is a normal lateral (approximant) letter, with a circle top - showing the position. A font might even overlay the two circles to form a ligature.

Rhotic Letters

On the Vowels page, you met the semivowel, the semivowel version of the rhotic vowel. This letter encompasses several approximants, each of which has its own specific letter in Musa. In many of the languages that use them, they're not considered rhotic.

The superscripts in the IPA above aren't canonical, but those are the most common pronunciations.

Most sources analyze the Czech ř as an alveolar laminal non-sibilant fricative trill. We write it as a rhotic letter with a hushing bottom:

Rare Glottal Letters

On the previous page, you met the common glottal letters   , but there are a couple others, both very rare. One is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant; the other is a voiceless nasal glottal approximant:

Approximants

An approximant is a sound that's made by constricting your mouth a little, but not enough to create turbulence in the flow of air - that would make it a fricative. On the vowels page, you met some semivowels - they're approximants. The laterals that aren't fricatives or affricates are also approximants.

But here we're going to meet some more approximants, written in Musa with a circle top. They're an odd group: the first three are labial and coronal, the middle four are rhotic, and the last two are radical.

Musa also has approximant letters for w̬ and y̬ that are different from the semivowels w and y . They're rare, but can be used to spell the semivowels in cases where they conflict with the same letters being used as suffixes, for example Proto Indo-European w.

Another use is to spell approximants that are unspecified for rounding. For example, Spanish has both a semivowel y in words like abierto and hay, and an approximant y in words like tuyo and ayuda, in addition to its affricate y in words like ya and inyectar. Meanwhile, the g of pagar is also pronounced as an approximant w , and so are the b of habia as , and the d of adios as .

Recap

That's 59 additional letters, for a total of 121. Here's what you've seen so far (with transcriptions in IPA):


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