A biologist looking at some particular creature wants to know various things about it, to work out where it should be placed in conventional biological classification. Some properties are visible and therefore easy to work out, such as how many legs it has or whether it has fur, feathers or scales. In other cases, closer observation will be needed: tooth shape cannot usually be checked from a distance. Still other properties are behavioural, and our biologist might need to observe her creature over a longer period of time to figure out whether it lays eggs or bears live young, or what it eats.

The same goes for phonetic classification: some properties are straightforwardly observable when you look in a mirror, or can be figured out easily from feeling what your articulators are doing. Other features are harder to spot, and need some extra training before you will become aware of them. Furthermore, we also need to remember that phonemes are realized as various different allophones, so we must build up a picture of all the possible environments where that phoneme can occur and what happens there, to sort out how it behaves.

Biologists today are, of course, working within an agreed classification: when they observe a creature with particular physical traits, or particular behaviors, they can slot it into a framework of herbivores and carnivores; mammals, insects, birds and reptiles; vertebrates and invertebrates; and so on. Fortunately, phoneticians and phonologists have a similar, generally agreed framework for sounds. For consonants, we need to know six things to arrive at a classification: in the rest of this chapter, we shall consider these six sets of properties in turn, and assess which English phonemes fit into each category. Vowel classification involves rather different features. We are beginning with consonants because many of their properties are easier to ascertain from self-observation, and because the systems of consonant phonemes in different accents of English vary far less than the vowels.

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