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 does not 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 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:
| Final aspiration in E. Armenian |
| bard͡z |
pillow |
| bart͡s⁼ |
difficult |
| bart͡sʰ |
high |
English voiceless stop consonants 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[t]end vs. dis[tʰ]aste. Word-final voiceless stops optionally aspirate.
In many languages, such as the Chinese languages, Hindi, Icelandic, Korean,
Thai, and Ancient Greek, [p⁼ t⁼ k⁼] etc. and [pʰ tʰ
kʰ] etc. are different phonemes altogether.
Alemannic German dialects have unaspirated [p⁼ t⁼ k⁼] as well as aspirated [pʰ tʰ 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 has pre-aspirated
[ʰp ʰt ʰk]; 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 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/.
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 is included as aspiration,
voiceless aspiration is called just that to avoid ambiguity.
References
- 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
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