Linguistic terminology is so spiffy! There are plosives and flaps, approximants and glides, fricatives and affricatives, nasals and trills. Consonsonants can be velars, alveolars, labials, labiovelars, bilabials, labiodentals, palatals, uvulars, pharyngeals, or glottals. They can be voiced or unvoiced. And more ... all of which I am incompetent to address.

But, like the person who was delighted to learn that for his whole life he had been speaking prose without knowing it, I just love the sound of the words that describe the sounds of human language. And, in the context of the word zhurnal, that initial "zh" (the eighth letter of the Russian alphabet) is, I recently learned, a voiced postalveolar fricative.

What a mouthful!

(for pronunciation see TreasureKnowledge (26 Oct 2002), ...)

TopicLanguage - TopicZhurnal - 2003-09-27

(but according to Wikipedia, "The sound in Russian denoted by <ж> is commonly transcribed as a postalveolar fricative but is actually a laminal retroflex fricative.")

(correlates: Zhurnal and Zhurnaly, TreasureKnowledge, Kenosis, ...)