HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some
obstruent An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...
s. In English, aspirated
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced ...
s are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages (including Indian) and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive. In dialects with aspiration, to feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say ''spin'' and then ''pin'' . One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with ''pin'' that one does not get with ''spin''.


Transcription

In the
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
(IPA), aspirated consonants are written using the symbols for voiceless consonants followed by the aspiration modifier letter , a superscript form of the symbol for the voiceless glottal fricative . For instance, represents the voiceless bilabial stop, and represents the aspirated bilabial stop. Voiced consonants are seldom actually aspirated. Symbols for voiced consonants followed by , such as , typically represent consonants with
murmured voice Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) 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 ...
d release (see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor *Bottom (disambiguation) Bottom may refer to: Anatomy and sex * Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or ...
). 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 and aspirated . An old symbol for light aspiration was , 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 or and , but they are usually transcribed and , with the details of voice onset time given numerically. Preaspirated consonants are marked by placing the aspiration modifier letter before the consonant symbol: represents the preaspirated bilabial stop. Unaspirated or tenuis consonants are occasionally marked with the modifier letter for unaspiration , a
superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, whil ...
equals sign: . Usually, however, unaspirated consonants are left unmarked: .


Phonetics

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 The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States. With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United ...
, 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 Eastern Armenian ( ''arevelahayeren'') is one of the two standardized forms of Modern Armenian, the other being Western Armenian. The two standards form a pluricentric language. Eastern Armenian is spoken in Armenia, Artsakh, Russia, as we ...
, aspiration is contrastive even word-finally, and aspirated consonants occur in
consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education f ...
s. In Wahgi, consonants are aspirated only when they are in final position.


Degree

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 have voice onset times (VOTs) of about 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds, and English aspirated have VOTs of about 60, 70, and 80 ms. Voice onset time in Korean has been measured at 20, 25, and 50 ms for and 90, 95, and 125 for .


Doubling

When aspirated consonants are doubled or
geminated In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct fr ...
, 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.


Preaspiration

Icelandic and Faroese have consonants with preaspiration , and some scholars interpret them as consonant clusters as well. In Icelandic, preaspirated stops contrast with double stops and single stops: Preaspiration is also a feature of Scottish Gaelic: Preaspirated stops also occur in most
Sami languages Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise net ...
. For example, in Northern Sami, the unvoiced stop and affricate phonemes , , , , are pronounced preaspirated (, , , ) in medial or final position.


Fricatives and sonorants

Although most aspirated obstruents in the world's languages are stops and affricates,
aspirated fricative 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 ...
s such as , or have been documented in Korean, though these are allophones of other phonemes. Similarly, aspirated fricatives and even aspirated nasals, approximants, and trills occur in a few Tibeto-Burman languages, in some Oto-Manguean languages, in the Hmongic language
Hmu The Hmu language (''hveb Hmub''), also known as Qiandong Miao (黔东, Eastern Guizhou Miao), Central Miao, East Hmongic, or (somewhat ambiguously) Black Miao, is a dialect cluster of Hmongic languages of China. The best studied dialect is that ...
, and in the Siouan language
Ofo Ofo (), stylised as ofo, was a Beijing-based bicycle sharing company founded in 2014. It used a dockless system with a smartphone app to unlock and locate nearby bicycles, charging an hourly rate for use. In 2017, it had deployed over 10 mil ...
. Some languages, such as Choni Tibetan, have as many as four contrastive aspirated fricatives , and .


Voiced consonants with voiceless aspiration

True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to
murmured Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) 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 ...
(breathy-voice) consonants such as the that are common among the languages of India, are extremely rare. They have been documented in Kelabit.


Phonology

Aspiration has varying significance in different languages. It is either allophonic or phonemic, and may be analyzed as an underlying consonant cluster.


Allophonic

In some languages, such as English, aspiration is allophonic. Stops are distinguished primarily by voicing, and voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated, while voiced stops are usually unaspirated. English voiceless
stops Stop may refer to: Places *Stop, Kentucky, an unincorporated community in the United States * Stop (Rogatica), a village in Rogatica, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina Facilities * Bus stop * Truck stop, a type of rest stop for truck dri ...
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 Indian English (IE) is a group of English dialects spoken in the republic of India and among the Indian diaspora. English is used by the Indian government for communication, along with Hindi, as enshrined in the Constitution of India. E ...
speakers, may make them get confused with the corresponding voiced stop by other English-speakers. 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 since it is not analyzed as two morphemes, but ''distaste'' has an aspirated middle 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.


Phonemic

In many languages, such as Armenian, Korean, Lakota, Thai, Indo-Aryan languages, Dravidian languages, Icelandic, Faroese,
Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
, and the varieties of Chinese, tenuis and aspirated consonants are phonemic. Unaspirated consonants like and aspirated consonants like are separate phonemes, and words are distinguished by whether they have one or the other.


Consonant cluster

Alemannic German dialects have unaspirated as well as aspirated ; the latter series are usually viewed as
consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education f ...
s.


Tenseness

In Danish and most southern varieties of German, the lenis consonants transcribed for historical reasons as are distinguished from their
fortis Fortis may refer to: Business * Fortis AG, a Swiss watch company * Fortis Films, an American film and television production company founded by actress and producer Sandra Bullock * Fortis Healthcare, a chain of hospitals in India * Fortis Inc ...
counterparts , mainly in their lack of aspiration.


Absence

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
, Standard Dutch,
Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans g ...
,
Turkish Turkish may refer to: *a Turkic language spoken by the Turks * of or about Turkey ** Turkish language *** Turkish alphabet ** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation *** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey *** Turkish communities and mi ...
, Tamil, Finnish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Latvian and Modern Greek are languages that do not have phonetic aspirated consonants.


Examples


Chinese

Standard Chinese Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern Standar ...
(Mandarin) has stops and affricates distinguished by aspiration: for instance, , . 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 , and ''t'' represents . Wu Chinese and
Southern Min Southern Min (), Minnan (Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwan ( ...
has a three-way distinction in stops and affricates: . In addition to aspirated and unaspirated consonants, there is a series of ''muddy consonants'', like . These are pronounced with
slack Slack may refer to: Places * Slack, West Yorkshire, a village in Calderdale, England * The Slack, a village in County Durham, England * Slack (river), a river in Pas-de-Calais department, France * Slacks Creek, Queensland, a suburb of Logan City, ...
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.


Indian languages

Many Indo-Aryan languages have aspirated stops. Sanskrit,
Hindustani Hindustani may refer to: * something of, from, or related to Hindustan (another name of India) * Hindustani language, an Indo-Aryan language, whose two official norms are Hindi and Urdu * Fiji Hindi, a variety of Eastern Hindi spoken in Fiji, and ...
, Bengali,
Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people *Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece See also * * ...
, and Gujarati have a four-way distinction in stops: voiceless, aspirated, voiced, and breathy-voiced or voiced aspirated, such as .
Punjabi Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to: * Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan * Punjabi language * Punjabi people * Punjabi dialects and languages Punjabi may also refer to: * Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
has lost breathy-voiced consonants, which resulted in a
tone system The musical system of ancient Greece evolved over a period of more than 500 years from simple scales of tetrachords, or divisions of the perfect fourth, into several complex systems encompassing tetrachords and octaves, as well as octave scales d ...
, and therefore has a distinction between voiceless, aspirated, and voiced: . Some of the Dravidian languages, such as
Telugu Telugu may refer to: * Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India *Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India * Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language ** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode S ...
, Malayalam, and Kannada, have a distinction between voiced and voiceless, aspirated and unaspirated only in loanwords from Indo-Aryan languages. In native Dravidian words, there is no distinction between these categories and stops are underspecified for voicing and aspiration.


Armenian

Most dialects of Armenian have aspirated stops, and some have breathy-voiced stops. Classical and
Eastern Armenian Eastern Armenian ( ''arevelahayeren'') is one of the two standardized forms of Modern Armenian, the other being Western Armenian. The two standards form a pluricentric language. Eastern Armenian is spoken in Armenia, Artsakh, Russia, as we ...
have a three-way distinction between voiceless, aspirated, and voiced, such as . Western Armenian has a two-way distinction between aspirated and voiced: . Western Armenian aspirated corresponds to Eastern Armenian aspirated and voiced , and Western voiced corresponds to Eastern voiceless .


Greek

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
, including the Classical Attic and Koine Greek dialects, had a three-way distinction in stops like Eastern Armenian: . These series were called , , (''psilá, daséa, mésa'') "smooth, rough, intermediate", respectively, by Koine Greek grammarians. There were aspirated stops at three places of articulation: labial, coronal, and velar . Earlier Greek, represented by Mycenaean Greek, likely had a labialized velar aspirated stop , which later became labial, coronal, or velar depending on dialect and phonetic environment. The other Ancient Greek dialects, Ionic, Doric, Aeolic, and
Arcadocypriot Arcadocypriot, or southern Achaean, was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and in Cyprus. Its resemblance to Mycenaean Greek, as it is known from the Linear B corpus, suggests that Arcadocypriot is its descend ...
, likely had the same three-way distinction at one point, but Doric seems to have had a fricative in place of in the Classical period. Later, during the Koine and Medieval Greek periods, the aspirated and voiced stops of Attic Greek lenited to voiceless and voiced fricatives, yielding 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/.


Other uses


Debuccalization

The term ''aspiration'' sometimes refers to the sound change of debuccalization, in which a consonant is lenited (weakened) to become a
glottal stop The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
or fricative .


Breathy-voiced release

So-called voiced aspirated consonants are nearly always pronounced instead with breathy voice, a type of
phonation The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defini ...
or vibration of the vocal folds. The modifier letter after a voiced consonant actually represents a breathy-voiced or murmured dental stop, as with the "voiced aspirated" bilabial stop in the Indo-Aryan languages. This consonant is therefore more accurately transcribed as , with the diacritic for breathy voice, or with the modifier letter , a superscript form of the symbol for the voiced glottal fricative . Some linguists restrict the double-dot subscript to murmured
sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...
s, such as vowels and nasals, which are murmured throughout their duration, and use the superscript hook-aitch for the breathy-voiced release of obstruents.


See also

* Aspirated h * Breathy voice * Implosive consonant *
List of phonetic topics A * Acoustic phonetics * Active articulator * Affricate * Airstream mechanism * Alexander John Ellis * Alexander Melville Bell * Alfred C. Gimson * Allophone * Alveolar approximant () * Alveolar click () * Alveolar consonant * Alveolar ejectiv ...
*
Phonation The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defini ...
* Preaspiration * Rough breathing * Smooth breathing * Tenuis consonant (Unaspirated consonant) * Voice onset time


Notes


References

*Cho, T., & Ladefoged, P., "Variations and universals in VOT". In ''Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages V: UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics'' vol. 95. 1997. {{DEFAULTSORT:Aspiration (Phonetics) Phonetics Consonants by airstream