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Aspirated | |
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◌ʰ | |
Encoding | |
Entity (decimal) | ʰ |
Unicode (hex) | U+02B0 |
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages (including Indian ones) and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), aspirated consonants are written using the symbols for voiceless consonants followed by the aspiration modifier letter ⟨◌ʰ⟩, a superscript form of the symbol for the voiceless glottal fricative ⟨h⟩. For instance, ⟨p⟩ represents the voiceless bilabial stop, and ⟨pʰ⟩ represents the aspirated bilabial stop.
Voiced consonants are seldom actually aspirated. Symbols for voiced consonants followed by ⟨◌ʰ⟩, such as ⟨bʰ⟩, typically represent consonants with murmured voiced release (see below). In the grammatical tradition of Sanskrit, aspirated consonants are called voiceless aspirated, and breathy-voiced consonants are called voiced aspirated.
There are no dedicated IPA symbols for degrees of aspiration and typically only two degrees are marked: unaspirated ⟨k⟩ and aspirated ⟨kʰ⟩. An old symbol for light aspiration was ⟨ʻ⟩, but this is now obsolete. The aspiration modifier letter may be doubled to indicate especially strong or long aspiration. Hence, the two degrees of aspiration in Korean stops are sometimes transcribed ⟨kʰ kʰʰ⟩ or ⟨kʻ⟩ and ⟨kʰ⟩, but they are usually transcribed [k] and [kʰ], [1] with the details of voice onset time given numerically.
Preaspirated consonants are marked by placing the aspiration modifier letter before the consonant symbol: ⟨ʰp⟩ represents the preaspirated bilabial stop.
Unaspirated or tenuis consonants are occasionally marked with the modifier letter for unaspiration ⟨◌˭⟩, a superscript equals sign: ⟨t˭⟩. Usually, however, unaspirated consonants are left unmarked: ⟨t⟩.
Voiceless consonants are produced with the vocal folds open (spread) and not vibrating, and voiced consonants are produced when the vocal folds are fractionally closed and vibrating (modal voice). Voiceless aspiration occurs when the vocal folds remain open after a consonant is released. An easy way to measure this is by noting the consonant's voice onset time, as the voicing of a following vowel cannot begin until the vocal folds close.
In some languages, such as Navajo, aspiration of stops tends to be phonetically realised as voiceless velar airflow; aspiration of affricates is realised as an extended length of the frication.
Aspirated consonants are not always followed by vowels or other voiced sounds. For example, in Eastern Armenian, aspiration is contrastive even word-finally, and aspirated consonants occur in consonant clusters. In Wahgi, consonants are aspirated only when they are in final position.
The degree of aspiration varies: the voice onset time of aspirated stops is longer or shorter depending on the language or the place of articulation.
Armenian and Cantonese have aspiration that lasts about as long as English aspirated stops, in addition to unaspirated stops. Korean has lightly-aspirated stops that fall between the Armenian and Cantonese unaspirated and aspirated stops as well as strongly-aspirated stops whose aspiration lasts longer than that of Armenian or Cantonese. (See voice onset time.)
Aspiration varies with place of articulation. The Spanish voiceless stops /ptk/ have voice onset times (VOTs) of about 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds, and English aspirated /ptk/ have VOTs of about 60, 70, and 80 ms. Voice onset time in Korean has been measured at 20, 25, and 50 ms for /ptk/ and 90, 95, and 125 for /pʰtʰkʰ/. [2]
When aspirated consonants are doubled or geminated, the stop is held longer and then has an aspirated release. An aspirated affricate consists of a stop, fricative, and aspirated release. A doubled aspirated affricate has a longer hold in the stop portion and then has a release consisting of the fricative and aspiration.
Icelandic and Faroese have consonants with preaspiration [ʰpʰtʰk], and some scholars[ who? ] interpret them as consonant clusters as well. In Icelandic, preaspirated stops contrast with double stops and single stops:
Word | IPA | Meaning |
---|---|---|
kapp | [kʰɑʰp] or [kʰɑhp] | zeal |
gabb | [kɑpp] | hoax |
gap | [kɑːp] | opening |
Preaspiration is also a feature of Scottish Gaelic:
Word | IPA | Meaning |
---|---|---|
cat | [kʰɑʰt] | cat |
Preaspirated stops also occur in most Sami languages. For example, in Northern Sami, the unvoiced stop and affricate phonemes /p/, /t/, /ts/, /tʃ/, /k/ are pronounced preaspirated ([ʰp], [ʰt][ʰts], [ʰtʃ], [ʰk]) in medial or final position.
Although most aspirated obstruents in the world's languages are stops and affricates, aspirated fricatives such as [sʰ], [ɸʷʰ] and [ɕʰ] have been documented in Korean, and [xʰ] has been described for Spanish, [3] though these are allophones of other phonemes. Similarly, aspirated fricatives and even aspirated nasals, approximants, and trills occur in a few Tibeto-Burman languages, some Oto-Manguean languages, the Hmongic language Hmu, the Siouan language Ofo, and the Chumashan languages Barbareño and Ventureño. Some languages, such as Choni Tibetan, have as many as four contrastive aspirated fricatives [sʰ][ɕʰ], [ʂʰ] and [xʰ]. [4]
True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the [bʱ],[dʱ],[ɡʱ] that are common among the languages of India, are extremely rare. They have been documented in Kelabit. [5]
Aspiration has varying significance in different languages. It is either allophonic or phonemic, and may be analyzed as an underlying consonant cluster.
In some languages, stops are distinguished primarily by voicing,[ citation needed ] and voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated, while voiced stops are usually unaspirated.
English voiceless stops are aspirated for most native speakers when they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable. Pronouncing them as unaspirated in these positions, as is done by many Indian English speakers, may make them get confused with the corresponding voiced stop by other English-speakers.[ citation needed ] Conversely, this confusion does not happen with the native speakers of languages which have aspirated and unaspirated but not voiced stops, such as Mandarin Chinese.
S+consonant clusters may vary between aspirated and nonaspirated depending upon if the cluster crosses a morpheme boundary or not. For instance, distend has unaspirated [t] since it is not analyzed as two morphemes, but distaste has an aspirated middle [tʰ] because it is analyzed as dis- + taste and the word taste has an aspirated initial t.
Word-final voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated.
Voiceless stops in Pashto are slightly aspirated prevocalically in a stressed syllable.
In many languages, such as Hindi, tenuis and aspirated consonants are phonemic. Unaspirated consonants like [p˭s˭] and aspirated consonants like [pʰʰpsʰ] are separate phonemes, and words are distinguished by whether they have one or the other.
Alemannic German dialects have unaspirated [p˭t˭k˭] as well as aspirated [pʰtʰkʰ]; the latter series are usually viewed as consonant clusters.
French, [6] Standard Dutch, [7] Afrikaans, Tamil, Finnish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Latvian and Modern Greek are languages that do not have phonetic aspirated consonants.
Standard Chinese (Mandarin) has stops and affricates distinguished by aspiration: for instance, /ttʰ/, /t͡st͡sʰ/. In pinyin, tenuis stops are written with letters that represent voiced consonants in English, and aspirated stops with letters that represent voiceless consonants. Thus d represents /t/, and t represents /tʰ/.
Wu Chinese and Southern Min has a three-way distinction in stops and affricates: /ppʰb/. In addition to aspirated and unaspirated consonants, there is a series of muddy consonants, like /b/. These are pronounced with slack or breathy voice: that is, they are weakly voiced. Muddy consonants as initial cause a syllable to be pronounced with low pitch or light (陽 yáng) tone.
Many Indo-Aryan languages have aspirated stops. Sanskrit, Hindustani, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati have a four-way distinction in stops: voiceless, aspirated, voiced, and voiced aspirated, such as /ppʰbbʱ/. Punjabi has lost voiced aspirated consonants, which resulted in a tone system, and therefore has a distinction between voiceless, aspirated, and voiced: /ppʰb/.
Other languages such as Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada, have a distinction between voiced and voiceless, aspirated and unaspirated.
Most dialects of Armenian have aspirated stops, and some have breathy-voiced stops.
Classical and Eastern Armenian have a three-way distinction between voiceless, aspirated, and voiced, such as /ttʰd/.
Western Armenian has a two-way distinction between aspirated and voiced: /tʰd/. Western Armenian aspirated /tʰ/ corresponds to Eastern Armenian aspirated /tʰ/ and voiced /d/, and Western voiced /d/ corresponds to Eastern voiceless /t/.
Ancient Greek, including the Classical Attic and Koine Greek dialects, had a three-way distinction in stops like Eastern Armenian: /ttʰd/. These series were called ψιλά , δασέα , μέσα (psilá, daséa, mésa) "smooth, rough, intermediate", respectively, by Koine Greek grammarians.
There were aspirated stops at three places of articulation: labial, coronal, and velar /pʰtʰkʰ/. Earlier Greek, represented by Mycenaean Greek, likely had a labialized velar aspirated stop /kʷʰ/, which later became labial, coronal, or velar depending on dialect and phonetic environment.
The other Ancient Greek dialects, Ionic, Doric, Aeolic, and Arcadocypriot, likely had the same three-way distinction at one point, but Doric seems to have had a fricative in place of /tʰ/ in the Classical period.
Later, during the Koine and Medieval Greek periods, the aspirated and voiced stops /tʰd/ of Attic Greek lenited to voiceless and voiced fricatives, yielding /θð/ in Medieval and Modern Greek. Cypriot Greek is notable for aspirating its inherited (and developed across word-boundaries) voiceless geminate stops, yielding the series /pʰː tʰː cʰː kʰː/. [8]
The term aspiration sometimes refers to the sound change of debuccalization, in which a consonant is lenited (weakened) to become a glottal stop or fricative [ʔhɦ].
So-called voiced aspirated consonants are nearly always pronounced instead with breathy voice, a type of phonation or vibration of the vocal folds. The modifier letter ⟨◌ʰ⟩ after a voiced consonant actually represents a breathy-voiced or murmured consonant, as with the "voiced aspirated" bilabial stop ⟨bʰ⟩ in the Indo-Aryan languages. This consonant is therefore more accurately transcribed as ⟨b̤⟩, with the diacritic for breathy voice, or with the modifier letter ⟨bʱ⟩, a superscript form of the symbol for the voiced glottal fricative ⟨ɦ⟩.
Some linguists restrict the double-dot subscript ⟨◌̤⟩ to murmured sonorants, such as vowels and nasals, which are murmured throughout their duration, and use the superscript hook-aitch ⟨◌ʱ⟩ for the breathy-voiced release of obstruents.
Breathy voiceBRETH-ee is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like sound. A simple breathy phonation,, can sometimes be heard as an allophone of English between vowels, such as in the word behind, for some speakers.
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German ; or the side of the tongue against the molars, in the case of Welsh. This turbulent airflow is called frication.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation. It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and, often spelled ch and j, respectively.
Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound.
The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective or otherwise non-pulmonic stops, *pʼ *tʼ *kʼ, instead of the plain voiced ones, *b *d *ɡ as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions.
In phonetics, voice onset time (VOT) is a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time that passes between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, the vibration of the vocal folds, or, according to other authors, periodicity. Some authors allow negative values to mark voicing that begins during the period of articulatory closure for the consonant and continues in the release, for those unaspirated voiced stops in which there is no voicing present at the instant of articulatory closure.
In linguistics, a tenuis consonant is an obstruent that is voiceless, unaspirated and unglottalized.
Bhutia is a language of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Bhutia people in Sikkim, India, and in parts of Koshi, Nepal. It is one of the official language in Sikkim.
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There is no standard variety of Scottish Gaelic; although statements below are about all or most dialects, the north-western dialects are discussed more than others as they represent the majority of speakers.
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