Everything about Preaspiration totally explained
In
phonetics,
preaspiration is a period of
voicelessness or
aspiration preceding the closure of a voiceless
obstruent, basically equivalent to an [h]-like sound preceding the obstruent. In other words, when an obstruent is preaspirated, the
glottis is opened for some time before the obstruent closure. To mark preaspiration using the
International Phonetic Alphabet, generally the diacritic for regular aspiration (a superscript "h", [ʰ]), is placed before the preaspirated consonant.
Preaspiration is comparatively uncommon across languages of the world, and is claimed by some to not be
phonemically contrastive in any language. A distinction is therefore often made between so-called
normative and
non-normative preaspiration: in a language with normative preaspiration of certain voiceless obstruents, the preaspiration is obligatory even though it isn't a distinctive feature; in a language with non-normative preaspiration, the preaspiration is non-obligatory, and may not appear. other potential realizations include [x] and even [f].
Preaspiration is perhaps best-known from
Scandinavian languages--most prominently in
Icelandic and
Faroese, but it occurs in some dialects of
Norwegian and
Swedish as well. It also occurs, among other languages, in
Scottish Gaelic,
Halh Mongolian, some
Sami languages, and in several
American Indian languages, including dialects of
Cree,
Ojibwe,
Fox, and
Hopi.
Some examples of preaspirated
plosives from
Icelandic (where they occur only after stressed vowels):
- kappi [ˈkʰaʰpi], "hero"
- hattur [ˈhaʰtʏr], "hat"
- þakka [ˈθaʰka], "thank"
Similar examples from
Faroese:
kappi [ˈkʰaʰpə], "cape"
hattur [ˈhaʰtʊr], "hat"
takka [ˈtʰaʰka], "thank"
In Huautla Mazatec, preaspirates can occur word-initially, perhaps uniquely among languages which contain preaspirates:
[ʰti] - "fish"
[ʰtse] - "a sore"
[ʰtʃi] - "small"
[ʰka] - "stubble"
Further Information
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