Consonant Consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and , pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and and , which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels. Since the number of possible sounds in all of the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one
Origin of speech rare. Another objection is that in the view of most scholars, speech as we know it emerged relatively late in human evolution, roughly contemporaneously with the emergence of "Homo sapiens." A development as complex as the reconfiguration of the human vocal tract would have required much more time, implying an early date of origin. This discrepancy in timescales undermines the idea that human vocal flexibility was "initially" driven by selection pressures for speech. At least one orangutan has demonstrated the ability to control the voice box. To lower the larynx is to increase the length of the vocal tract, in