Consonant

the words for 'sea' consistently depend upon continuant consonants, while the words for 'earth' or 'ground' depend upon plosive consonants... The sea as we move over or through it does not involve an obstruction of movement; whereas the earth or ground, at least insofar as it breaks a fall, always does.

Abram presents cross-linguistic evidence that consonant type — continuant versus plosive — is motivated by bodily and elemental experience, grounding phonological form in phenomenological reality.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

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In the Greek alphabet, the analysis of the syllable will give the same status to the vowel and to consonants. The writing system reveals a semiotics of the language; thus emerges the difference between a language of the Greek type and a language of the Phoenician type.

Benveniste argues that the Greek alphabet's structural equality of vowels and consonants constitutes a semiotic revolution, distinguishing it decisively from Semitic writing systems where consonants predominate.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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Socrates then considers music... Three distinctions are to be posited: the grave, the acute and the in-between. To be a mousikos one must have the ability to analyse and recognise: 1. the differences, the intervals; 2. the combinations.

Benveniste traces, via Socrates and Theuth, the ancient Greek recognition that sounds — including consonants — must be enumerated, differentiated, and combined into systems, establishing the combinatory logic underlying all semiotics.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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Mute Initial Consonants In words which begin with a group of two or three consonants, the following initial consonants are mute: g, d, b, m, h, and likewise: r, l, s (these three are mute as prefixes as well as between two consonants).

Govinda's pronunciation guide for Tibetan demonstrates that consonants in sacred language carry structural complexity and historical depth, their mute or sounded status encoding centuries of phonological drift within a living spiritual tradition.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting

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In Greek a word may end only with one of the consonants -n, -r, or -s, the sole exception being the negation ou(k). It follows that there is in each language a register of possibilities and impossibilities which characterize the use of its phonological system.

Benveniste uses the distributional constraints on consonants in Greek and Indo-European to demonstrate that every language encodes a structured field of phonological permissions and exclusions constitutive of its identity.

Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting

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Protestants, Catholics, and Jews raised in a dissonant neighborhood were more likely to have lower self-esteem, greater depression, and more psychosomatic symptoms than their counterparts who grew up in religiously consonant environments.

Pargament deploys 'consonant' in its psychosocial rather than phonological sense, treating religious environmental fit as a variable with measurable psychological consequences for self-esteem and well-being.

Pargament, Kenneth I, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting

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the consonant (now final) is assimilated to the following consonant, e.g. KIIC vva/jiiv, KoAAtTTf, dft TTCCIOV. 1. Single consonants, esp. X, p, v, p, and σ, at the beginning of a word, after a vowel, are frequently doubled.

The Homeric Dictionary records the assimilation and doubling of consonants as metrical and phonological conventions in Homeric Greek, treating consonantal behavior as a systemic feature of archaic oral composition.

G, Autenrieth, Homeric Dictionaryaside

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Breaks interrupt time and change its data. Archilochos' written texts break pieces of passing sound off from time and hold them as his own.

Carson's analysis of poetic meter and alphabetic writing implies that the consonantal and syllabic breaks in written language enact an erotic topology of presence and absence, separation and longing.

Carson, Anne, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986aside

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