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The diacritic for aspiration in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript "h", . Unaspirated consonants are not normally marked explicitly, but there is a diacritic for non-aspiration in the Extended IPA , the superscript equal sign, .

Voiceless consonants are produced with the Vocal Cords open. (Voicing involves bringing the vocal cords close together.) Voiceless aspiration occurs when the vocal cords 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 cords close. However, aspirated consonants are not always followed by vowels or other voiced sounds; indeed, in Eastern Armenian , aspiration is contrastive even at the ends of words:

English Voiceless Stop Consonant s are aspirated when they are word-initial or begin a Stressed Syllable , as in ''pen'', ''ten'', ''Ken'', but this is not distinctive. That is, these consonants have unaspirated variants in other positions, such as word-finally or in an initial cluster with {Link without Title} , as in ''spun'', ''stun'', ''skunk''. In many languages, such as the Chinese Language s, Hindi , Icelandic , Korean , Thai , and Ancient Greek , ''etc.'' and ''etc.'' are different Phoneme s altogether.

Alemannic German Dialects have unaspirated as well as aspirated ; the latter series are usually viewed as Consonant Cluster s. In Danish and most southern varieties of German , the " Lenis " consonants transcribed for historical reasons as are distinguished them from their " Fortis " counterparts mainly in their lack of aspiration.

Icelandic has pre-aspirated ; some scholars interpret these as consonant clusters as well.

  • vs. ---. Note however that Korean is nearly universally transcribed as vs. , with the details of voice onset time given numerically.


Aspiration also varies with Place Of Articulation . Spanish /p t k/, for example, have voice onset times (VOTs) of about 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds, whereas English /p t k/ have VOTs of about 60, 70, and 80 ms. Korean has been measured at 20, 25, and 50 ms for /p t k/ and 90, 95, and 125 for .

The word 'aspiration' and the aspiration symbol is sometimes used with voiced stops, such as . However, such "voiced aspiration", also known as ''breathy Voice'' Or ''murmur'' , is less ambiguously transcribed with dedicated diacritics, either or . (Some linguists restrict the subscript diacritic to Sonorant s, such as Vowel s and Nasal Consonant s, which are murmured throughout their duration, and use the superscript for the murmured release of obstruents.) When it is included as aspiration, voiceless aspiration is called just that to avoid ambiguity.


REFERENCE

  • Taehong Cho and Peter Ladefoged, "Variations and universals in VOT". In ''Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages V: UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics'' vol. 95. 1997.



SEE ALSO