In
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
, aspiration is the strong burst of
breath
Breathing (or ventilation) is the process of moving air into and from the lungs to facilitate gas exchange with the internal environment, mostly to flush out carbon dioxide and bring in oxygen.
All aerobic creatures need oxygen for cellu ...
that accompanies either the release or, in the case of
preaspiration, the
closure of some
obstruents. 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 w ...
s are
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
s in
complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most
South Asian languages (including
Indian
Indian or Indians may refer to:
Peoples South Asia
* Indian people, people of Indian nationality, or people who have an Indian ancestor
** Non-resident Indian, a citizen of India who has temporarily emigrated to another country
* South Asia ...
) 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 notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
(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 voiced release (see
below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
* Ground (disambiguation)
*Soil
*Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
*Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
*Hell or underworld
People with the surname
*Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
*Fred Below ...
). In the
grammatical tradition of
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...
, 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 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, 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 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 fie ...
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
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding a ...
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. 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 fricatives 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
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people sp ...
, in some
Oto-Manguean languages
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
, 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 system, bicycle sharing company founded in 2014. It used a Bicycle-sharing system#Dockless bikes, dockless system with a smartphone app to unlock and locate nearby bicycles, charging ...
. 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-lik ...
(breathy-voice) consonants such as the that are common among the
languages of India
Languages spoken in India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians, both families together are sometimes know ...
, 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
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ' ...
. Stops are distinguished primarily by
voicing, and voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated, while voiced stops are usually unaspirated.
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
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. 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
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
.
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
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official langua ...
are slightly aspirated prevocalically in a stressed syllable.
Phonemic
In many languages, such as
Armenian,
Korean,
Lakota,
Thai,
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, P ...
,
Dravidian languages
The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant im ...
,
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 pe ...
, 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 fie ...
s.
Tenseness
In
Danish and most southern varieties of
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
, the
lenis consonants transcribed for historical reasons as are distinguished from their
fortis 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 gr ...
,
Turkish,
Tamil
Tamil may refer to:
* Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia
** Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils
**Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia
* Tamil language, na ...
,
Finnish,
Portuguese,
Italian,
Spanish,
Russian,
Polish,
Latvian and
Modern Greek
Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...
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 standa ...
(Mandarin) has stops and affricates distinguished by aspiration: for instance, , . In
pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...
, 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 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 or
breathy voice: that is, they are weakly voiced. Muddy consonants as
initial
In a written or published work, an initial capital, also referred to as a drop capital or simply an initial cap, initial, initcapital, initcap or init or a drop cap or drop, is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph tha ...
cause a syllable to be pronounced with low pitch or
''light'' (陽 ''yáng'') tone.
Indian languages
Many
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, P ...
have aspirated stops.
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...
,
Hindustani,
Bengali
Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to:
*something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia
* Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region
* Bengali language, the language they speak
** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
,
Marathi, and
Gujarati
Gujarati may refer to:
* something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India
* Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat
* Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them
* Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub- ...
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
The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant im ...
, 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
...
,
Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry ( Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam wa ...
, and
Kannada
Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...
, 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 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 pe ...
, including the
Classical Attic and
Koine Greek
Koine Greek (; Koine el, ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, hē koinè diálektos, the common dialect; ), also known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-reg ...
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 Doric may refer to:
* Doric, of or relating to the Dorians of ancient Greece
** Doric Greek, the dialects of the Dorians
* Doric order, a style of ancient Greek architecture
* Doric mode, a synonym of Dorian mode
* Doric dialect (Scotland)
* 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 desce ...
, 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
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
and
Modern Greek
Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...
.
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 or
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 ...
.
Breathy-voiced release
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 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
The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, P ...
. 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
sonorants, such as
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
s 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
In French spelling, aspirated "h" ( French: ''"h" aspiré'') is an initial silent letter that represents a hiatus at a word boundary, between the word's first vowel and the preceding word's last vowel. At the same time, the aspirated ''h'' st ...
*
Breathy voice
*
Implosive consonant
*
List of phonetic topics
*
Phonation
*
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