The turbulence, not the vocal cords, makes the sound. In the picture below are several simplified views of the glottal passage and the vocal cords, which are surrounded by thyroid cartilage. Can be phonemic in Danish. Invented for English after 1948. Robots who speak typically sound inhuman because they lack intonation.
Intonation patterns vary widely among language systems.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is full enough and complex enough so that a trained phonetician ought to be able to transcribe any language spoken in the world today so that another phonetician, not knowing the language, could recite the transcriber's symbols and be understood by a native speaker. If you set yourself to say and then pronounce , you can feel your velum opening to allow air to escape. Nasalization is a process of breath and sound production where sound escapes partly through the nasal passage and partly through the mouth. A number of major sound changes in the development of the Indo-European languages are a result of palatalization, leading to affrication . This is the beginning of palatalization.