In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breathing that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some . In English, aspirated are in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
Transcription
In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), aspirated consonants are written using the symbols for
voicelessness 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 release (see below). In the shiksha 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 ,[ word lists from 1977, 1966, 1975.] 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 are occasionally marked with the modifier letter for unaspiration , a superscript equals sign: . Usually, however, unaspirated consonants are left unmarked: .
Phonetics
Voicelessness 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 phonology, 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 clusters. In Wahgi language, 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
gemination, 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 language 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:
|
| kapp | or | zeal |
| gabb | | hoax |
| gap | | opening |
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 , and have been documented in
Korean language and
Xuanzhou Wu, and has been described for Spanish,
[Schwegler, Kempff & Ameal-Guerra (2010) Fonética y fonología españolas. John Wiley, 4th ed.] though these are allophones of other phonemes. Similarly, aspirated fricatives and even aspirated nasals, approximants, and trills occur in a few Tibeto-Burman languages, some Oto-Manguean languages, the Hmongic language
Hmu language, the
Siouan languages language
Ofo language, and the Chumashan languages Barbareño and Ventureño. Some languages, such as
Choni language, have as many as four contrastive aspirated fricatives , and .
[Guillaume Jacques 2011. A panchronic study of aspirated fricatives, with new evidence from Pumi, Lingua 121.9:1518–1538 [4]]
Voiced consonants with voiceless aspiration
True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to
murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the that are common among the languages of India, are extremely rare. They have been documented in
Kelabit language.
[Robert Blust, 2006, "The Origin of the Kelabit Voiced Aspirates: A Historical Hypothesis Revisited", Oceanic Linguistics 45:311]
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, stops are distinguished primarily by voicing, and voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated, while voiced stops are usually unaspirated.
English language voiceless stop consonant 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.
S+consonant clusters can vary between aspirated and unaspirated forms depending on whether the cluster crosses a morpheme boundary. For example, distend features an unaspirated t because it is not analyzed as comprising two morphemes. In contrast, distaste includes an aspirated middle tʰ since it is analyzed as dis- + taste, and the word taste begins with an aspirated 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
Hindi language, tenuis and aspirated consonants are
phoneme. 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 have unaspirated as well as aspirated ; the latter series are usually viewed as consonant clusters.
Absence
French language,
[
] Dutch language,
[Frans Hinskens, Johan Taeldeman, Language and space: Dutch, Walter de Gruyter 2014. 3110261332, 9783110261332, p.66] Afrikaans,
Tamil language,
Finnish language, Portuguese,
Italian language,
Spanish language,
Russian language,
Polish language,
Latvian language and
Greek language are languages that do not have phonetic aspirated consonants.
Examples
Chinese
Standard Chinese (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 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 voice 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,
Bengali language,
Marathi language, and Gujarati have a four-way distinction in stops: voiceless, aspirated, voiced, and voiced aspirated, such as .
Punjabi language has lost voiced aspirated consonants, which resulted in a tone system, and therefore has a distinction between voiceless, aspirated, and voiced: .
Other languages such as Telugu language, Malayalam, and Kannada, have a distinction between voiced and voiceless, aspirated and unaspirated. However, in all of these languages, aspirated consonant occur (mostly) in borrowed words, and commonly substituted with their unaspirated counterparts.
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, including the
Attic Greek 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 Greek, Doric Greek, Aeolic Greek, and Arcadocypriot, 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 Greek 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
lenition (weakened) to become a
glottal stop or fricative .
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 consonant, 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 , such as and nasal consonant, which are murmured throughout their duration, and use the superscript hook-aitch for the breathy-voiced release of obstruents.
See also
Notes
-
Cho, T., & Ladefoged, P., "Variations and universals in VOT". In Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages V: UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics vol. 95. 1997.
