Everything about Aspiration Phonetics totally explained
In
phonetics,
aspiration is the strong burst of
air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some
obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of his or her mouth, and say
tore ([tʰɔɹ]) and then
store ([stɔɹ]). One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with
tore that one doesn't get with
store. In English, the
t should be aspirated in
tore and unaspirated in
store.
The diacritic for aspiration in the
International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript "h", [ʰ] . Unaspirated consonants are not normally marked explicitly, but there's a diacritic for non-aspiration in the
Extensions to the IPA, the superscript equal sign, [⁼].
Description
Voiceless consonants are produced with the
vocal cords open and voiced consonants are produced when the vocal folds are fractionally closed. 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 can't begin until the vocal cords close.
Usage patterns
English voiceless stop consonants are aspirated for most native speakers when they're 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're normally unaspirated as well, except when the cluster is heteromorphemic and the stop belongs to an unbound morpheme; compare dis[t]end vs. dis[tʰ]aste. Word-final voiceless stops optionally aspirate.
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. For example compare: bard͡z
pillow, with bart͡s⁼
difficult and bart͡sʰ
high.
In many languages, such as the
Chinese languages,
Indo-Aryan languages (from
Sanskrit),
Dravidian languages (for example under the influence of
Sanskrit.
Tamil, the classical Dravidian tongue doesn't show aspiration at all),
Icelandic,
Korean,
Thai, and
Ancient Greek, [p⁼t⁼ k⁼]
etc. and [pʰtʰ kʰ]
etc. are different
phonemes altogether.
Alemannic German dialects have unaspirated [p⁼t⁼ k⁼] as well as aspirated [pʰtʰ kʰ]; the latter series are usually viewed as
consonant clusters. In
Danish and most southern varieties of
German, the "
lenis" consonants transcribed for historical reasons as <b d g> are distinguished from their "
fortis" counterparts <p t k> mainly in their lack of aspiration.
Icelandic and
Faroese have
pre-aspirated [ʰpʰt ʰk]; some scholars interpret these as consonant clusters as well. Preaspirated stops also occur in some
Sami languages; for example in
Skolt Sami the unvoiced stop phonemes p, t, c, k are pronounced preaspirated (ʰp, ʰt ʰc ʰk) when they occur in medial or final position.
There are degrees of aspiration. Armenian and Cantonese have aspiration that lasts about as long as English aspirated stops, as well as unaspirated stops like Spanish. 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.) An old IPA symbol for light aspiration was [ ʻ ] (that is, like a rotated ejective symbol), but this is no longer commonly used. There is no specific symbol for strong aspiration, but [ʰ] can be iconically doubled for, say, Korean *[kʻ ] vs. *[kʰʰ]. Note however that Korean is nearly universally transcribed as [k] vs. [kʰ], 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 /pʰ tʰ kʰ/.
Usage of [ʰ]
The word 'aspiration' and the aspiration symbol is sometimes used with voiced stops, such as [dʰ]. However, such "voiced aspiration", also known as
breathy voice or murmur, is less ambiguously transcribed with dedicated diacritics, either [d̤] or [dʱ]. (Some linguists restrict the subscript diacritic [ ̤] to
sonorants, such as
vowels and
nasal consonants, which are murmured throughout their duration, and use the superscript [ʱ] for the murmured release of obstruents.) When it's included as aspiration, voiceless aspiration is called just that to avoid ambiguity.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Aspiration Phonetics'.
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