could not be pronounced without a vowel. This term was calqued into Latin as , and from there borrowed into English as mute. Mute was sometimes used instead for voiceless consonants, whether plosives or fricatives, a usage that was later replaced with surd, from Latin "deaf" or "silent", a term still occasionally seen in the literature. For more information on the Ancient Greek terms, see . Articulation A plosive is typically analysed as having up to three phases: Approach, during which articulators come together Hold (or "occlusion" or "closure"), during which the articulators are held and block the airstream Release (or "burst" or "plosion"), when the articulators are separated, releasing the compressed air Only the hold phase is requisite. A plosive may lack an approach when it is preceded by a consonant that involves an occlusion at the same place of articulation, as in in end or old. In many languages, such as Malay and Vietnamese, word-final plosives lack a release burst, even when followed by a vowel, or have a nasal release. See no audible release. Nasal occlusives are somewhat similar. In the catch and hold, airflow continues through the nose; in the release, there is no burst, and final nasals are typically unreleased across most languages. In affricates, the catch and hold are those of a plosive, but the release is that of a fricative. That is, affricates are plosive–fricative contours. Common plosives All spoken natural languages in the world have plosives, and most have at least the voiceless plosives , , and . However, there are exceptions: Colloquial Samoan lacks the coronal , and several North American languages, such as the northern Iroquoian and southern Iroquoian languages (i.e., Cherokee), and Arabic lack the labial . In fact, the labial is the least stable of the voiceless plosives in the languages of the world, as the unconditioned sound change → (→ → Ø) is quite common in unrelated languages, having occurred in the history of Classical Japanese, Classical Arabic, and Proto-Celtic, for instance. Formal Samoan has only one word with velar ; colloquial Samoan conflates and to . Ni‘ihau Hawaiian has for to a greater extent than Standard Hawaiian, but neither distinguish a from a . It may be more accurate to say that Hawaiian and colloquial Samoan do not distinguish velar and coronal plosives than to say they lack one or the other. Ontena Gadsup has only