spirant

As Tolkien and Conlang specialist Helge Fauskanger observes, in his essay "Orkish and the Black Speech: a Base Language for Base Purposes," there is apparently nothing inherent in the language itself that might justify this poor appraisal: "The Black Speech possesses the plosives b, g, d, p, t, k, the spirants th, gh (and possibly f and kh, attested in Ore-names only), the lateral 1, the vibrant r, the nasals m, n, and the sibilants s, z, sh," observes Fauskanger.

Spirants include sibilants /s/ and /s/ along with affricates /z/ [ts?] and possibly Id [to].

You may hear that the suddenly dense consonantal mesh of glottal stops and terminal spirants, along with heavy assonance (three soundings each of so-called long "a" and short "e," depending on whether the vowel of "death" had finished its shortening from Chaucer's longer pronunciation by the time it came to Milton's ear, along with perhaps two of the vowel sound in "Rocks" and "Bogs," if he heard them as identical) and the rhyme of "Fens" and "Dens," echo the hideously garbled soundtrack of demonic gasps of despair at this first glimpse of the nether "Universe of death."

Although Luick's hypothesis concerning limitations of voicing were adopted by structurally-oriented scholars, like Moulton (1954:21: "The voicing of medial voiceless spirants affected those following a stressed vowel, but not those following an unstressed vowel."), Campbell (1959:180, note 1) considered that rule doubtful because "this leaves isolated exceptions, each of which has to be separately explained away".

A "semivowel" would refer to those consonants we classify today as spirants (fricatives) and liquids.

(9) In Old, Middle, and Early Modern Irish, consonants are divided into groups for rhyming purposes, based on their phonemic properties (stops versus spirants and voiced versus voiceless, for example).

Nasals Voiced m Lateral Voiced Spirants Voiceless f Voiced Bilabial Alveolar Apicopalatal Place of Articulation Lower Alveolar teeth ridge Manner of Articulation Tongue tip Stops Voiceless Unasp.

A linguist, for example, might note the effective placing of dental and palatal spirants in these famous lines from Verlaine:

Jonathan Owens revisits the dental spirants and uses Neo-Arabic evidence to argue that the early Aramaic reflex of Proto-Semitic [eth] always varied synchronically between [d] and [z], as it does in spoken Arabic today, against the inherited theory that in Aramaic two changes occurred in sequence [eth] > [d] and [d] > [z] (among other explanations).

tan be explained by the process of unvoicing of final voiced fricatives, which took place shortly after the voicing of medial spirants (Campbell 1959:180).

The three voiced stops /b, d, g/ are in complementary distribution (i.e., different allophones of the same phoneme that cannot occur in the same linguistic environment) with the spirants [[beta]] (voiced bilabial), [[eth]], and [[??]] (voiced velar), respectively.