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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 for most native speakers when they are word-initial or begin a Stressed Syllable , as in ''pen'', ''ten'', ''Ken''. They are unaspirated for almost all speakers when immediately following word-initial s, as in ''spun'', ''stun'', ''skunk''. After s elsewhere in a word they are normally unaspirated as well, except when the cluster is heteromorphemic and the stop belongs to an unbound morpheme; compare dis vs. dis[tÊ° aste. Word-final voiceless stops optionally aspirate. 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 from their " Fortis " counterparts mainly in their lack of aspiration. Icelandic has Pre-aspirated ; some scholars interpret these as consonant clusters as well. Preaspirated stops also occur in some Sami Languages ; e.g. in Skolt Sami the unvoiced stop phonemes , , , are pronounced preaspirated (, ) when they occur in medial or final position.
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 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. REFERENCES
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