Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A usually voiced speech sound characterized by relatively free air flow through the vocal tract and capable of being syllabic, as a vowel, liquid, or nasal.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun phonetics A speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; the generic term of
vowel ,approximant ,nasal consonant , etc.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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I was looking at some liquid herbal remedies of different varieties when I heard a deep, sonorant voice with a thick Belizian accent near my ear.
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Thus in Czech, liquids are treated as moraic and both syllables show normal sonority peaks headed by the most sonorant phoneme of the group (i.e. s PIE *ḱunós 'of the dog') can only be a declined noun based on its form (because of its zerograded root *kun-) and at this stage, no derivative of "dog" can start with *kun- in the nominative or accusative cases either.
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Turning palatalization into gemination, BTW, is completely ridiculous - does that really happen somewhere or are you picking that from something like the Germanic gemination-before-a-sonorant pattern?
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Primo: In PIE, the initial sequence of sonorant + consonant is treated the same consistently.
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In this case, being that *w (sonorant) trumps *d (stop) on the sonorancy scale, the two in that order cannot consitute a legal syllable onset.
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