In
linguistics, a tenuis consonant ( or ) is an
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 ...
that is
voiceless,
unaspirated and
unglottalized.
In other words, it has the "plain"
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 ...
of with a
voice onset time close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as
Spanish ''p, t, ch, k'' or
English ''p, t, k'' after ''s'' (''spy, sty, sky'').
For most languages, the distinction is relevant only for
stops and
affricate
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. ...
s. However, a few languages have analogous series for
fricatives.
Mazahua Mazahua may refer to:
* Mazahua people, an indigenous people of Mexico
* Mazahua language
The Mazahua language ( maz, Jñatrjo) is an Oto-Pamean language spoken in the central states of Mexico by the ethnic group that is widely known as the Ma ...
, for example, has ejective, aspirated, and voiced fricatives alongside tenuis , parallel to stops alongside tenuis .
Many
click language
Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the ''tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...
s have tenuis click consonants alongside voiced, aspirated, and glottalized series.
Transcription
In transcription, tenuis consonants are not normally marked explicitly, and consonants written with voiceless IPA letters, such as , are typically assumed to be unaspirated and unglottalized unless otherwise indicated. However, aspiration is often left untranscribed if no contrast needs to be made, like in English, so there is an explicit diacritic for a lack of aspiration in the
extensions to the IPA, a superscript equal sign: . It is sometimes seen in phonetic descriptions of languages.
[Collins & Mees, 1984, ''The Sounds of English and Dutch'']
p. 281
/ref> There are also languages, such as the Northern Ryukyuan languages, whose phonologically- unmarked sound is aspirated, and the tenuis consonants are marked and transcribed explicitly.
In Unicode, the symbol is encoded at .
An early IPA convention was to write the tenuis stops etc. if the plain letters were used for aspirated consonants (as they are in English): 'pie' vs. 'spy'.
Etymology
The term ''tenuis'' comes from Latin translations of Ancient Greek grammar, which differentiated three series of consonants, voiced ''β δ γ'' , aspirate ''φ θ χ'' , and tenuis ''π τ κ'' . Analogous series occur in many other languages. The term was widely used in 19th-century philology but became uncommon in the 20th.
See also
* Grassmann's law
* Spiritus asper
*Spiritus lenis
The smooth breathing ( grc, ψιλὸν πνεῦμα, psilòn pneûma; ell, ψιλή ''psilí''; la, spīritus lēnis) is a diacritical mark used in polytonic orthography. In Ancient Greek, it marks the absence of the voiceless glottal fricat ...
Sources
* Bussmann, 1996. ''Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics''
* R.L. Trask, 1996. ''A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tenuis Consonant
Phonetics