ABSTRACT
The best way to approach the different manners of oral consonants is to group them first according to how much of a gap there is between the active and passive articulators. (There will still be some sounds left over even when we have done this, but this is a good first step.)
Think again about how the nasals were articulated. The active and passive articulators formed a complete obstruction to the airstream and so they were firmly in contact with each other. If this same gesture is made, but this time with the velum in the raised position so that we also have velic closure, we get the first major class of oral consonants. To produce these consonants, the active articulator approaches the passive one, contacts it and forms a firm closure; even while this closure is in place, air is still being expelled from the lungs; but there is also velic closure and so the only place for air to go is into the mouth, as far as the obstruction; this causes air pressure in the mouth to build up; after a brief interval of 'holding' this position, the active articulator moves sharply away from the passive one, creating a fairly wide gap between them (which we call wide MEDIAN APPROXIMATION) and allowing all the air to explode out
of the oral cavity; we hear this as a sort of single burst or pop or explosive sound and this is how we make sounds like the consonants in the middle of appear and obey, at the beginning of pay and bang and at the end of hope and hob. Such sounds are called PLOSIVE. Thus we have a voiceless bilabial plosive in appear, pay, hope and a voiced bilabial plosive in obey, bang, hob. If we add to these the voiced bilabial nasal at the beginning of me, you can see that our system is already capable of distinguishing all the English bilabials.
