Aspirated consonant

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 /p t k/ have voice onset times (VOTs) of about 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds, and English aspirated /p t k/ have VOTs of about 60, 70, and 80 ms. Voice onset time in Korean has been measured at 20, 25, and 50 ms for /p t k/ and 90, 95, and 125 for /pʰ tʰ kʰ/.[2]

When aspirated consonants are doubled or geminated, 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.

Icelandic and Faroese have consonants with preaspiration [ʰp ʰt ʰk], and some scholars interpret them as consonant clusters as well. In Icelandic, preaspirated stops contrast with double stops and single stops:

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 /p/, /t/, /ts/, /tʃ/, /k/ are pronounced preaspirated ([ʰp], [ʰt] [ʰts], [ʰtʃ], [ʰk]) in medial or final position.

Although most aspirated obstruents in the world's languages are stops and affricates, aspirated fricatives such as [sʰ], [ɸʷʰ] or [ɕʰ] have been documented in Korean, 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, the Siouan language Ofo, and the Chumashan languages Barbareño and Ventureño. Some languages, such as Choni Tibetan, have as many as four contrastive aspirated fricatives [sʰ] [ɕʰ], [ʂʰ] and [xʰ].[3]

True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the [bʱ], [dʱ], [ɡʱ] that are common among the languages of India, are extremely rare. They have been documented in Kelabit.[4]

In some languages, stops are distinguished primarily by voicing, and voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated, while voiced stops are usually unaspirated.

English voiceless stops 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 may vary between aspirated and nonaspirated depending upon if the cluster crosses a morpheme boundary or not. For instance, distend has unaspirated [t] since it is not analyzed as two morphemes, but distaste has an aspirated middle [tʰ] because it is analyzed as dis- + taste and the word taste has an aspirated initial t.

Word-final voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated.

Voiceless stops in Pashto are slightly aspirated prevocalically in a stressed syllable.

In many languages, such as Armenian, Korean, Lakota, Thai, Indo-Aryan languages, Dravidian languages, Icelandic, Faroese, Ancient Greek, and the varieties of Chinese, tenuis and aspirated consonants are phonemic. Unaspirated consonants like [p˭ s˭] and aspirated consonants like [pʰ ʰp sʰ] are separate phonemes, and words are distinguished by whether they have one or the other.

Alemannic German dialects have unaspirated [p˭ t˭ k˭] as well as aspirated [pʰ tʰ kʰ]; the latter series are usually viewed as consonant clusters.

French,[5] Standard Dutch,[6] Afrikaans, Tamil, Finnish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Latvian and Modern Greek are languages that do not have phonetic aspirated consonants.

Standard Chinese (Mandarin) has stops and affricates distinguished by aspiration: for instance, /t tʰ/, /t͡s t͡sʰ/. 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 /t/, and t represents /tʰ/.

Wu Chinese and Southern Min has a three-way distinction in stops and affricates: /p pʰ b/. In addition to aspirated and unaspirated consonants, there is a series of muddy consonants, like /b/. These are pronounced with slack 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.

Many Indo-Aryan languages have aspirated stops. Sanskrit, Hindustani, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati have a four-way distinction in stops: voiceless, aspirated, voiced, and voiced aspirated, such as /p pʰ b bʱ/. Punjabi has lost voiced aspirated consonants, which resulted in a tone system, and therefore has a distinction between voiceless, aspirated, and voiced: /p pʰ b/.

Other languages such as Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada, have a distinction between voiced and voiceless, aspirated and unaspirated.

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 /t tʰ d/.

Western Armenian has a two-way distinction between aspirated and voiced: /tʰ d/. Western Armenian aspirated /tʰ/ corresponds to Eastern Armenian aspirated /tʰ/ and voiced /d/, and Western voiced /d/ corresponds to Eastern voiceless /t/.

Ancient Greek, including the Classical Attic and Koine Greek dialects, had a three-way distinction in stops like Eastern Armenian: /t tʰ d/. These series were called ψιλά, δασέα, μέσα (psilá, daséa, mésa) "smooth, rough, intermediate", respectively, by Koine Greek grammarians.

There were aspirated stops at three places of articulation: labial, coronal, and velar /pʰ tʰ kʰ/. Earlier Greek, represented by Mycenaean Greek, likely had a labialized velar aspirated stop /kʷʰ/, which later became labial, coronal, or velar depending on dialect and phonetic environment.

The other Ancient Greek dialects, Ionic, Doric, Aeolic, and Arcadocypriot, likely had the same three-way distinction at one point, but Doric seems to have had a fricative in place of /tʰ/ in the Classical period.

Later, during the Koine and Medieval Greek periods, the aspirated and voiced stops /tʰ d/ of Attic Greek lenited to voiceless and voiced fricatives, yielding /θ ð/ in Medieval 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/.[7]

The term aspiration sometimes refers to the sound change of debuccalization, in which a consonant is lenited (weakened) to become a glottal stop or fricative [ʔ h ɦ].

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 ⟨◌ʰ⟩ after a voiced consonant actually represents a breathy-voiced or murmured dental stop, as with the "voiced aspirated" bilabial stop ⟨bʰ⟩ in the Indo-Aryan languages. This consonant is therefore more accurately transcribed as ⟨b̤⟩, with the diacritic for breathy voice, or with the modifier letter ⟨bʱ⟩, a superscript form of the symbol for the voiced glottal fricative ⟨ɦ⟩.

Some linguists restrict the double-dot subscript ⟨◌̤⟩ to murmured sonorants, such as vowels and nasals, which are murmured throughout their duration, and use the superscript hook-aitch ⟨◌ʱ⟩ for the breathy-voiced release of obstruents.