Creaky-voiced glottal approximant

See also: Breathy-voiced glottal approximant

Creaky-voiced glottal approximant
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A creaky-voiced glottal approximant is a consonant sound in some languages. It involves tension in the glottis and diminution of airflow, compared to surrounding vowels, but not full occlusion. It is a common phonetic realization of a glottal stop, especially intervocalically, but is only rarely contrastive except when gemination is involved.

There is no symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet dedicated to this sound, but the extIPA pre-/post-creak diacritic ⟨˷⟩ can be used. One source has used the transcription ⟨ʔ̬⟩, ^[1] and another has used ⟨ʔ̰⟩; ^[2] however, neither are physically possible, ^[a] and the sources quote Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), who use the IPA wildcard ⟨*⟩ in their transcription.

Features

Features of a creaky-voiced glottal approximant:

• Its manner of articulation is approximant, which means it is produced by narrowing the vocal tract at the place of articulation, but not enough to produce a turbulent airstream.
• Its phonation is creaky-voiced.
• It is an oral consonant, which means that air is not allowed to escape through the nose.
• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the median–lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• Its airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air only with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

Occurrence

It is an intervocalic allophone of a glottal stop in many languages; in languages with gemination, it may only be a stop intervocalically when geminate. ^[3]

Language	Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Gimi	hagok	[ha˷oʔ]	'many'	The voiced equivalent of a glottal stop /ʔ/; /˷/ and /ʔ/ correspond to /ɡ/ and /k/ in neighboring languages. [3] One source analyses the pair instead as /ʔ/ and /ʔː/.
Korebaju	[út͡ʃàpè˷é]		'oil'	Non-contrastive allophone of /ʔ/. [4]
Siona	maʼa	[ma̰a̰]	'path'	Allophone of /ʔ/ typically realized as creak on surrounding vowels. [5]

Notes

1. Garellek et al. (2023), p. 310.
2. Kehrein & Golston (2005), p. 333.
3. Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), pp. 75–78.
4. Vega Rodriguez, Jenifer; Vallée, Nathalie (2021), Glottal Sounds in Korebaju (PDF), doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1417
5. Bruil, Martine; Stewart, Jesse (2022), "Phonetics and phonology of nasality in Ecuadorian Siona" (PDF), Phonological Data & Analysis, 4: 1–34, doi:10.3765/pda.v4art3.44

1. Just as modal voice and creaky voice are phonation states, so too is a glottal stop [ ʔ ]; by definition, the glottis is closed, blocking the airstream, preventing any occurrence of voicing. Similarly, the glottal fricatives [ h ] and [ ɦ ] are frequently analyzed as segmental realizations of phonation states (voiceless aspiration and breathy voice) and lacking a place of articulation other than the glottis, as shown for example in Garellek et al. (2023). Adding a creaky-voice diacritic to any of these symbols would imply contradicting laryngeal settings.

References

• Garellek, Marc; Chai, Yuan; Huang, Yaqian; Van Doren, Maxine (2023). "Voicing of glottal consonants and non-modal vowels". Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 53 (2): 305–332. doi: 10.1017/S0025100321000116 .
• Kehrein, Wolfgang; Golston, Chris (2005). "A prosodic theory of laryngeal contrasts". Phonology. 21 (3): 325–357. doi:10.1017/S0952675704000302. JSTOR   4615515. S2CID   62734231.
• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN   0-631-19815-6.