Voiceless alveolar tap and flap

The voiceless alveolar tap or flap is rare as a phoneme. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɾ̥, a combination of the letter for the voiced alveolar tap/flap and a diacritic indicating voicelessness. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is 4_0.

Voiceless alveolar tap
ɾ̥
IPA Number124 402A
Encoding
X-SAMPA4_0

The voiceless alveolar tapped fricative reported from some languages is actually a very brief voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative.

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolar tap or flap:

  • Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
  • It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
  • It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.

Occurrence

Alveolar

LanguageWordIPAMeaningNotes
Bengali[1]আবার[ˈäbäɾ̥]'again'Possible allophone of /ɹ/ in the syllable coda.[1] See Bengali phonology
Englishthrow[θɾ̪̊oʊ]'throw'Allophone of /ɹ/ after /θ/.
GreekCypriotαρφός[ɐɾ̥ˈfo̞s]'brother'Allophone of /ɾ/ before voiceless consonants. May be a voiceless alveolar trill instead
Icelandichrafn[ˈɾ̥apn̪̊]'raven'Realization of /r̥/ for some speakers. Also illustrates /n̥/. See Icelandic phonology
PortugueseEuropean[2]assar[əˈsäɾ̥]'to bake'Apparent allophone of /ɾ/; distribution unclear, but common in the coda in Jesus (2001)'s corpus. See Portuguese phonology

See also

Notes

References

  • Jesus, Luis Miguel Teixeira (2001), Acoustic Phonetics of European Portuguese Fricative Consonant (Ph.D.), University of Southampton
  • Khan, Sameer ud Dowla (2010), "Bengali (Bangladeshi Standard)" (PDF), Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 40 (2): 221–225, doi:10.1017/S0025100310000071
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.