More Consonants Contents

On the previous pages, you met 52 basic letters. But there are many more than 52 sounds in all the world's languages; many single languages have more sounds than that! To write all the sounds in most of the world's languages, Shwa uses three tricks:

In general, these tricks are only used where needed, in other words if the language being written has two sounds that would otherwise be written with the same Shwa letter. For example in English, the k in keel and the c in cool are written with the same Shwa letter - there's no ambiguity even though they're pronounced slightly differently. But in Arabic, those are two different sounds (written with the letters ك kāf and ق qāf in Arabic), and so Shwa has a ligature for qāf.

On this page, I'll show you some new bottoms, two new tops, and a few more unusual letters. I'll show you the other tricks on the following pages.

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

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

Palatal Letters

We'll start with the palatals. Many Romance languages have palatal ns, as in Italian Spagna, French Espagne, Catalan Espanya, Spanish España and Portuguese Espanha. In Shwa, those palatal ns are written using a letter with the nasal triangle on top and the bottom from a y (which can be reflected to avoid a diagonal) :

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 more like a lateral version of the English y, with your tongue against the top of your mouth and the air escaping around the sides.)

This palatal l is not the same as a normal l followed by the y semivowel, for instance 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.

The Czech alveolar fricative trill, now written ř, is written in Shwa as if it were a palatal r. This fits well with the other palatal letters in Czech.

In Chinese, the velar plosives k and g have softened to palatal affricates (pinyin q j) 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 ts dz s (pinyin c z s) and hushing ch dj sh (pinyin ch zh sh) :

Note that Shwa uses the same letters for palatal fricatives and sibilants, and the same letters for palatal plosives and affricates. The pronunciations are very close, and no language needs both, as far as I know.

Polish also contrasts three series of affricates/sibilants:

Here's a full list of palatal letters :

Retroflex Letters

The retroflex letters use the bottoms from the er vowel. They're actually quite common, used in almost all of the languages of India. There are retroflex versions of the plosives d t, sibilants z s and sonorants n r l. As with palatals, the bottom can be reflected to avoid diagonals.

Retroflex sibilants or affricates are usually just written with the hushing letters :

But some languages contrast hissing (alveolar), hushing (alveolo-palatal), retroflex and palatal sibilants, so Shwa has letters for all of them.

Radical Letters

We use a bottom that looks like the ah vowel for two sounds pronounced with your tongue root, deep in your throat. Phoneticists distinguish between pharyngeal, epiglottal and even epiglotto-pharyngeal sounds, but Shwa doesn't. These are the two sounds represented by the Arabic letters ع ayn and ح heh.

As with the palatal and retroflex bottoms, this radical bottom can be reflected to avoid a diagonal.

Uvular Letters

The uvular letters are used when a language has two conflicting dorsal sounds. For example, the Quechua languages all distinguish a uvular q from a velar k. Here are some uvular letters (note the uvular bottom is not reflected to avoid diagonals) :

The uvular r is only used when the sound is not rhotic ; the guttural r of French, German or Danish, which is sometimes uvular, is written with the velar rh you met on the last page.

Bilabial Letters

The Bilabial letters are used when a language has two conflicting labial sounds. For example, Éwé (Eʋegbe), a language of Ghana and Togo, distinguishes between bilabial β and Φ and labio-dental v and f. When writing Éwé in Shwa, we use the normal Shwa v and f for the labio-dental sounds, and we use the bilabial β and Φ for the bilabial sounds.

Bilabial letters are also used for labial-velar stops, as found in many West African languages : kp and gb (as in the name of the Nigerian language Igbo) and nasal ŋm. They're not clusters - the two sounds are pronounced simultaneously.

Lateral Fricatives

Shwa has four letters for lateral fricatives, as occur in Welsh, Zulu, Navajo and Tlingit, for example. The dorsal series is found in Archi and Toda. The unvoiced laterals introduce a new top :

Rare Letters

There are a few more letters for odd sounds. Several have a rhotic top :

Malayalam features two alveolar sounds which contrast with more common dental sounds. The dental sounds use the basic Shwa letters, and the alveolar sounds use hissing letters :

Recap

That's 35 additional letters. Here's what you've seen so far (with transcriptions in IPA):


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