1897 - 98 .] Mr E. J. Lloyd on Consonant- Sounds. 
223 
tongue and palate, (4) a frictional constriction between lower teeth 
and upper lip. The words frictional and non-frictional are (and 
will be) used to indicate that the issuing breath does or does not 
produce audible friction. The above conditions are exhaustive; 
and they are essential. If the nose is open, the breath flows out 
that way, either silently or in a nasal aspirate ; if the larynx is 
open, but not breathing, there is silence ; if it is breathing, but 
not freely open, there is either tone or whisper, and the / is trans- 
formed into a toned or whispered v ; if the tongue is moved up, so 
as to make the inner passage at all frictional, the / is changed into 
6 ; and if the outer constriction is relaxed till it ceases to be 
markedly frictional, the / melts away into a kind of h. It ought 
to be possible, starting from these completely determined con- 
ditions of /, to discover something about the resulting sound. 
In / there is but one source of sound ; it is the frictional noise 
of the breath struggling through the narrow interstices between the 
teeth and the lip. But this noise awakens resonance in the cavity 
behind ; and though this resonance has not the perfect regularity 
of a musical tone it is regular enough to convey a less definite 
sensation of its own frequency, i.e., of its pitch. In this respect, 
/ serves as a preliminary type of all fricative consonants. Every 
fricative consonant contains frictional noise, and resonance conse- 
quent upon it. The simplicity of / is that it has friction in one 
place only, resonance apparently in one cavity only, and no im- 
perative alteration either in the friction or in the resonance, i.e., 
neither of them need change in character from beginning to end of 
the consonant. These fricative resonances have some important 
features in common. One and all, they are prompted by irregular 
noises, in cavities of somewhat irregular shape. Such cavities 
never have an exact proper tone, like a pipe, or a string, or a 
tuning-fork; they respond to any stimulus which is sufficiently 
near to their proper tone. Hence the character which these 
resonances present to the ear. They are weak through mutual 
interference ; they are indefinite, so that it is impossible to fix 
their position in the octave by ear to an exact semitone ; and to 
what octave they belong it is always utterly impossible to say. 
Nevertheless, when they are forced by any change of articulation 
to change their pitch, the change in the whole body of resonance 
