linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...

, a tenuis consonant ( or ) is an obstruent that is

voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies ...

unaspirated In linguistics, a tenuis consonant ( or ) is an obstruent that is voiceless, unaspirated and unglottalized. In other words, it has the "plain" phonation of with a voice onset time close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as Spanish ''p, t, ...

and unglottalized. In other words, it has the "plain" phonation of with a

voice onset time 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, accor ...

close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

''p, t, ch, k'' or

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 ide ...

''p, t, k'' after ''s'' (''spy, sty, sky''). For most languages, the distinction is relevant only for

stop 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 d ...

s and affricates. However, a few languages have analogous series for

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 t ...

s. Mazahua, 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 The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internati ...

, 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 The Northern Ryukyuan languages are a group of languages spoken in the Amami Islands, Kagoshima Prefecture and the Okinawa Islands, Okinawa Prefecture of southwestern Japan. It is one of two primary branches of the Ryukyuan languages, which are t ...

, whose phonologically-

unmarked In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...

sound is aspirated, and the tenuis consonants are marked and transcribed explicitly. In

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

, 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 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 ...

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.

Sources

* Bussmann, 1996. ''Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics'' * R.L. Trask, 1996. ''A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tenuis Consonant Phonetics

Transcription

Etymology

See also

Sources

References