Pronunciation and Phonology in the EFL Classroom - Manner of Articulation Pt. 2
Now let's take a look at our fricatives. As the name indicates, especially in the beginning there we have a friction going on in the vocal tract and that's basically what we're dealing with mostly. There are a number of fricative sounds and they're made by placing two vocal organs together and making them vibrate to a point, which is audible. We have nine of these sounds and then move from the front to the back of the vocal tract. Let's take a look here in the front of the mouth we have two sounds, which involve our lips. Those two sounds are ?f? and ?v?. The only difference between those two sounds is that one is voiced and the other is not. Regardless we do involve our lips and they are the furthest front of the vocal tract with our fricatives. Again those sounds are ?f? and ?v?. Moving just a bit further back we're involving our tongue and our teeth. Those are the TH sounds and we're putting our tongue in between our teeth and those two bits of the vocal tract are vibrating together. They're the voiced and unvoiced TH sounds and those are ?th? and ?th?. You can even feel the friction as it goes on. Again those are ?th? and ?th? sounds. Now moving a bit further back in the mouth we have our friction, which comes from the middle of our mouth. Those sounds we have four of them are ?s? and ?z?. Those two sounds are made in the same manner and in the same place and here we have an instance where again one is voiced and the other is not. First the unvoiced ?s? and the voiced ?z?. Our second set of sounds within this part of our vocal tract are ?sh? and ?j?. Again, very similar sounds same place, same manner of articulation, the only difference is that one is voiced, while the other is not. Let's look at the unvoiced and the voiced. Then, we have our sound that is into the back and that is in the glottis it's the H or the ?h? sound. That aspiration becomes a lot more audible when we have what are called the glottal languages being German to a certain extent Dutch and certainly our Arabic languages.
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