Voiceless lateral fricative

The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is K. The symbol is called "belted l" and is distinct from "l with tilde", , which transcribes a different sound, the velarized (or pharynɡealized) alveolar lateral approximant, often called "dark L".

Some scholars also posit the voiceless alveolar lateral approximant distinct from the fricative. The approximant may be represented in the IPA as .

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative:

Occurrence

The sound is fairly common among indigenous languages of the Americas, such as Nahuatl and Navajo, and in North Caucasian languages, such as Avar. It is also found in African languages, such as Zulu, and Asian languages, such as Chukchi, some Yue dialects like Taishanese, the Hlai languages of Hainan, and several Formosan languages and dialects in Taiwan.

The sound is rare in European languages outside the Caucasus, but it is found notably in Welsh in which it is written . Several Welsh names beginning with this sound ( Llwyd , Llywelyn ) have been borrowed into English and then retain the Welsh spelling but are pronounced with an (Lloyd, Llewellyn), or they are substituted with (pronounced ) (Floyd, Fluellen). It was also found in certain dialects of Lithuanian Yiddish.

The phoneme was also found in the most ancient Hebrew speech of the Ancient Israelites. The orthography of Biblical Hebrew, however, did not directly indicate the phoneme since it and several other phonemes of Ancient Hebrew did not have a grapheme of their own. The phoneme, however, is clearly attested by later developments: was written with , but the letter was also used for the sound . Later, merged with , a sound that had been written only with . As a result, three etymologically distinct modern Hebrew phonemes can be distinguished: written , written (with later niqqud pointing שׁ), and evolving from and written (with later niqqud pointing שׂ). The specific pronunciation of evolving from /s/ from is known based on comparative evidence since is the corresponding Proto-Semitic phoneme and is still attested in Modern South Arabian languages, and early borrowings indicate it from Ancient Hebrew (e.g. ''balsam'' < Greek ''balsamon'' < Hebrew ''baśam''). The phoneme began to merge with in Late Biblical Hebrew, as is indicated by interchange of orthographic and , possibly under the influence of Aramaic, and became the rule in Mishnaic Hebrew. In all Jewish reading traditions, and have merged completely, but in Samaritan Hebrew has instead merged into .

The sound is also found in two of the constructed languages invented by J. R. R. Tolkien, Sindarin (inspired by Welsh) and Quenya (inspired by Finnish, Ancient Greek, and Latin). In Sindarin, it is written as initially and medially and finally, and in Quenya, it appears only initially and is written .

Dental or denti-alveolar

Alveolar

Alveolar approximant

Semitic languages

The sound is conjectured as a phoneme for Proto-Semitic language, usually transcribed as ; it has evolved into Arabic , Hebrew :

Among Semitic languages, the sound still exists in contemporary Soqotri and Mehri. In Ge'ez, it is written with the letter Śawt.

Capital letter

Since the IPA letter "ɬ" has been adopted into the standard orthographies for many native North American languages, a capital letter L with belt "Ɬ" was requested by academics and added to the Unicode Standard version 7.0 in 2014 at U+A7AD.

See also

* Voiced dental and alveolar lateral fricatives
* Voiceless alveolar lateral affricate
* Index of phonetics articles

Notes

References

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Further reading

Beth am y llall?
''John Wells's phonetic blog'', 1 July 2009. (How the British phonetician John Wells would teach the sound .)

A chance to share more than just some sounds of languages
''walesonline.co.uk'', 3 May 2012 (Article by Dr Paul Tench including information on transcribing in Chadic languages.)

External links

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{{IPA navigation

Alveolar consonants
Fricative consonants
Lateral consonants
Pulmonic consonants
Voiceless oral consonants