Manner of Articulation

mechanism

A consonant depends not just on where the tongue is positioned, but on how that position controls airflow. At the same place of articulation, changing the degree of obstruction can move a sound from an approximant toward friction or complete closure.

Your tongue can stay in the same region of your mouth while the sound changes category. Leave a gap and air passes relatively freely; narrow it further and the same setup begins to hiss.

The gap is a sound control

Place tells you where the vocal tract shapes the airstream; manner tells you what happens to the air there. With an approximant such as y, r, or l, the tongue approaches a position without making the contact needed to stop the flow. Reduce the gap and the moving air becomes turbulent, producing the audible friction of a fricative such as an s-like hiss. Increase the obstruction still further and airflow can be blocked rather than merely narrowed. This is why Place of Articulation alone cannot identify a consonant: position and obstruction are separate controls.

Where it shows up

From approach to hiss

The sequence from y, r, and l to a hissing fricative reveals a continuum rather than a bag of unrelated sounds: the mouth can preserve its broad position while progressively tightening the passage available to air.

Obstruction is not the whole sound

Manner explains what the airflow does at a constriction, but it does not replace the other dimensions of speech. Two consonants can share a manner yet differ because the constriction occurs elsewhere, and airflow alone does not capture separate contrasts such as Voicing or Aspiration.

Change one control at a time

Choose an approximant such as y, r, or l, hold its broad tongue position, and slowly narrow the air passage until you hear friction. Treat the transition as a physical experiment: location stays roughly fixed while manner changes.

Episodes that teach this

Mind-blowing Science of Indian Languages - Why Sanskrit is Amazing & Mother of All? FutureIQ · explained at 7:20 333,107 views
"y r l are approximates... you keep the same mouth position... but you don't touch the tongue... fricatives... you narrow the gap even more and you actually cause the S sound, that hissing sound."