De Brosses holds that the only phonetically distinctive part of a language are its consonants; the vowels, he argues, are much more like the arbitrarily selected tones on a continuous scale. He divides up consonants in six groups: those formed with lips, throat, teeth, palate, tongue, and nose. Between these he distinguishes further between soft, rude, and moderate. For the Brosses this essentially captures all the phonetic differences in the world, the rest depending on undistinctive "local colour", though he allows for some finer contrast in the "organic" transcription of sounds.
