The word 'sibilant' is correct and usable in written English.
It is a descriptive adjective used to describe a type of speech sound that is made with a hissing or whistling effect, such as a "s" or "sh" sound. For example, you could say: "The sibilant sound of the wind blowing through the trees was soothing to her ears."
But he wrote about that too, in poignant, crystalline vignettes about his upbringing and travels.He was "raised on words" though by the end his vocal muscle, "for 60 years my reliable alter ego" failed him: "vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate".
The letter c was applied by French orthographists in the 12th century to represent the sound ts in English, and this sound developed into the simpler sibilant s.
The c takes the place of s in words such as "mice" and "advice," in which s would represent a voiced sibilant (identical with the sound of z), and in words such as "practice" merely as a means of grammatical distinction.
Proto-Indo-European had 12 stop consonants: *p, *t, *k, *kw; *b, *d, *g, *gw; *bh, *dh, *gh, and *gwh; and one sibilant, *s.
In addition to the above consonants (12 stops and the sibilant s), Proto-Indo-European also had vowels and resonants.
It is notable that the languages that have a velar for the Proto-Indo-European labiovelar stops (e.g., Sanskrit and Slavic) have a sibilant or palatal sound (s or ś) for the Proto-Indo-European simple velars.
In its sound system the Russian language has numerous sibilant consonants and consonant clusters as well as a series of palatalized consonants contrasting with a series of unpalatalized (plain) consonants.
There was one sibilant consonant, s, with a voiced alternant, z, that occurred automatically next to voiced stops.
The vowels i and ü and the semivowels y and ɥ never occur after velar sounds (e.g., k) and occur only after the palatalized affricate and sibilant sounds (e.g., tś), which in turn occur with no other vowels and semivowels.
In addition to these sounds Old Persian had another sibilant sound, often transcribed as ç or ss, which developed from the cluster θr (pronounced as the thr in three).
