The original Pitman's shorthand had an " alphabet " of consonants which was later modified.

There are twenty-four consonants that can be represented in Pitman's shorthand, twelve vowels and four diphthongs.

Gabelsberger shorthand has a full alphabet with signs for both consonants and vowels.

To help promote the language, Bell created two written short forms using his system of 29 modifiers and tones, 52 consonants, 36 vowels and a dozen diphthongs: they were named World English, which was similar to the International Phonetic Alphabet, and also Line Writing, used as a shorthand form for stenographers.

-- Syllables are linguistic units centering in peaks which are usually vocalic but, as has been noted, are consonantal under certain circumstances, and which may or may not be combined with preceding and/or following consonants or combinations of consonants.

In other types of alphabet either the vowels are not indicated at all, as was the case in the Phoenician alphabet ( such systems are known as abjads ), or else the vowels are shown by diacritics or modification of consonants, as in the devanagari used in India and Nepal ( these systems are known as abugidas or alphasyllabaries ).

These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed ; abugidas are also consonant-based, but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants.

In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters.

Conversely, the vowel marks of the Tigrinya abugida and the Amharic abugida ( ironically, the original source of the term " abugida ") have been so completely assimilated into their consonants that the modifications are no longer systematic and have to be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script.

According to the formulations of Daniels, abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, not vowels, are represented among the basic graphemes.

This is because words in Semitic languages are formed from a root consisting of ( usually ) three consonants, the vowels being used to indicate inflectional or derived forms.

As Daniels used the word, an abugida contrasts with a syllabary, where letters with shared consonants or vowels show no particular resemblance to each another, and with an alphabet proper, where independent letters are used to denote both consonants and vowels.

There are three principal families of abugidas, depending on whether vowels are indicated by modifying consonants by diacritics, distortion, or orientation.

* The oldest and largest is the Brahmic family of India and Southeast Asia, in which vowels are marked with diacritics and syllable-final consonants, when they occur, are indicated with ligatures, diacritics, or with a special vowel-canceling mark.

* In the Ethiopic family, vowels are marked by modifying the shapes of the consonants, and one of these pulls double duty for final consonants.

* In the Cree family, vowels are marked by rotating or flipping the consonants, and final consonants are indicated with either special diacritics or superscript forms of the main initial consonants.

Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna " pronounced with " because they can only be pronounced with a vowel.

The same claim is sometimes made for Yemenite Hebrew or Temanit, which differs from other Mizrahi dialects by having a radically different vowel system, and distinguishing between different diacritically marked consonants that are pronounced identically in other dialects ( for example gimel and " ghimel ".

Non-native pronunciation vastly differs from native pronunciation by way of key omissions of implosive and ejective consonants present in native Hausa dialects, such as ɗ, ɓ and kʼ / ƙ, which are pronounced by non-native speakers as d, b and k respectively.

The most characteristic differences, for instance, between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are the gemination of initial consonants and the pronunciation of stressed " e ", and of " s " in some cases: e. g. va bene " all right ": is pronounced by a Roman ( and by any standard-speaker ), by a Milanese ( and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of La Spezia-Rimini Line ); a casa " at home " is for Roman and standard, for Milanese and generally northern.

The other variant, so-called dark l found before consonants or word-finally, as in bold or tell, is pronounced as the velarized alveolar lateral approximant with the tongue assuming a spoon-like shape with its back part raised, which gives the sound a-or-like resonance.

Numbers with consecutive consonants are pronounced with vowel sounds between in accordance with a special rule.

In fact, only the " silent " final consonants which would be able to be pronounced the same way, if they were followed by a vowel, are able to rhyme together.

Most North American English accents differ from Received Pronunciation and some other British dialects by being rhotic ; the phoneme / r / is pronounced before consonants and at the end of syllables, and the " r-colored vowel " is used as a syllable nucleus.

For example, in Icelandic, both monophthongs and diphthongs are pronounced long before single consonants and short before most consonant clusters.

However, since final consonants are generally not pronounced in French, adding-s or-x does not generally affect pronunciation, so the singular and plural forms of most nouns are generally pronounced the same.

The doubled vowels indicate nasalization, and the final consonants indicate with which of the eight lexical tones the word is pronounced.

Most consonants are usually pronounced much as in other Modern Scots dialects but:

For example, Egyptian < hiero > G38 </ hiero > was used to write both " duck " and " son ", though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same apart from their consonants.

Nasal consonants may be lost while nasalization of the vowel is retained ( e. g., find may be pronounced ).

* Before nasal consonants (,, and ), and are both pronounced, making pen and pin homophones.

In front of low or back vowels (, or ) and consonants, it is pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative (), as in German ach.

Although the anusvara is a consonant in Bengali phonology, it is nevertheless treated in the written system as a diacritic in that it is always directly adjacent to the preceding consonant, even when spacing consonants apart in titles or banners ( e. g. < big > ব াং- ল া- দ ে- শ </ big > bang-la-de-sh, not < big > ব া-ং- ল া- দ ে- শ </ big > ba-ng-la-de-sh for < big > ব াং ল া দ ে শ </ big > Bangladesh ), it is never pronounced with the inherent vowel " ô ", and it cannot take a vowel sign ( instead, the consonant < big > ঙ </ big > ungô is used pre-vocalically ).

Certain consonants can be pronounced while whistling, so as to modify the whistled sound, much as consonants in spoken language modify the vowel sounds adjacent to them.

* Ď / ď, Ť / ť, Ň / ň ( palatals, pronounced,,, slightly different from palatalized consonants as found in Russian ): Ďábel a sťatý kůň " The Devil and a beheaded horse ")

Critics of the revised system claim it fails to represent 어 and 으 in an easily recognizable way, and that it misrepresents the unaspirated consonants as they are actually pronounced.

* Voiced consonants at the end of words are always unvoiced: rodje ( red ) is pronounced exactly as rotche ( rock ).

In Burmese, consonant clusters of only up to three consonants ( the initial and two medials — two written forms of, ) at the initial onset are allowed in writing and only two ( the initial and one medial ) are pronounced.

Like all the retroflex consonants, the IPA symbol is formed by adding a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of tee ( the letter used for the equivalent alveolar consonant ).

The gay lisp is a stereotypical manner of speech associated with gay males, particularly in English-speaking countries, that involves their pronunciation of sibilant consonants and sometimes others verbal features.

Like all the retroflex consonants, the IPA letter is formed by adding a rightward-pointing hook to the bottom of the ess ( the letter used for the corresponding alveolar consonant ).