Consonants in English

[fxdung]

In English, consonants are pronounced longer and more gentle than that in monosylable word language(example:Vietnamese).Except in grammatical words in English the consonants pronounced relative short.

Is that right?

I notice that English vowels are short compare with that in monosylable word languages

 

[jedishrfu]

I'm not fully understanding the question but searching on long and short consonants found this article that talks about their existence in Old English but have pretty much disappeared from Modern English.

https://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/tutorials/the-pronunciation-of-old-english

 

[dextercioby]

In modern English phonetics, there is no "length" of consonants. They are classified only with respect to the place and way of articulation.

 

[Algr]

I've heard the different vowel sounds described as "short" and "Long". The Long sounds sounded like the name of the letter, so "Abraham" has a long A at the beginning, and the others are short. This has nothing to do with the time devoted to vocalizing each sound - I don't think English uses thaaaaaaat.

 

[jtbell]

Except in grammatical words in English the consonants pronounced relative short.

I don't remember ever seeing the term "grammatical words", so I Googled it. Do you mean as in the following quote?

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110810105017258

Words for which the primary function is to indicate grammatical relationships, as distinct from lexical words, the primary function of which is referential (content words). Grammatical words include articles, pronouns, and conjunctions. Lexical words include nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

I suppose grammatical words also include prepositions (e.g. in, on, of).

My impression is that in English, such words are usually spoken without emphasis and are often indistinct or less distinct than other words. This could include, or at least be interpreted as, making the consonants shorter. This is purely a matter of speech patterns, and has no grammatical or lexical significance as far as I know.

 

[fxdung]

I mean grammatical words as you say in #5

 

[fxdung]

During the time tongue moves from the first position to the taget(final) position to make consonant, is there air flow through the mouth or not?Eg I hear the word "at" as "a"+very short silent+"stop t+slight air flow".There is a very very short silency between vowel a and consonant t(it seem to me).

 

[jedishrfu]

While this doesn't explicitly talk about airflow, it does show acoustic charts of pronunciation:

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.3523

and here's an article on how the vocal cords work:

https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics/chapter/2-2-how-humans-produce-speech/

and finally, this one where they get into airflow a bit:

https://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/speech.html

As an aside, I learned today that its "vocal cords" for American English and not "vocal chords" even though in music we say "chords" for groupings of notes.

 

[jedishrfu]

While researching the question, I also discovered some singer vocal ranges. Mariah Carey takes home the prize for largest vocal register of 5 octaves where at the highest notes, some dogs can't hear them.

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/singer-vocal-ranges/

Now back to the OP's question.

 

[BillTre]

While researching the question, I also discovered some singer vocal ranges. Mariah Carey takes home the prize for largest vocal register of 5 octaves where at the highest notes, some dogs can't hear them.

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/singer-vocal-ranges/

Now back to the OP's question.

TIL

 

[fxdung]

Voiceless consonants have frequency being infinity or zero?

 

[jedishrfu]

I would suspect they would be zero frequency-wise.

 

[Hornbein]

In English "long" and "short" indicate different vowel sounds. It has nothing to do with the length of time the vowel sounds. I believe that other languages have truly short and long sounds. Like the O in Osaka is long. But I'm not certain of that.