Voiceless postalveolar affricate
| IPA – text | tʃ |
| IPA – image | Missing image IPA_voiceless_postalveolar_affricate.png Image:IPA voiceless postalveolar affricate.png |
| entity | tʃ |
| X-SAMPA | tS |
| Kirshenbaum | tS |
| Missing image Loudspeaker.png Sound [[Media:|Sound sample]]? | |
|---|---|
The voiceless palato-alveolar fricative or domed postalveolar affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is [tʃ], and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is [tS]. Alternatives commonly used in linguistic works, particularly in older or American literature, are č and more rarely tš.
Historically, this sound often derives from a former voiceless velar plosive (k, as in English, Mandarin Chinese [note: this comment belongs with the alveolo-palatal fricatve], and Romance languages), or voiceless dental plosive (t, as in Japanese) [note: this comment belongs with the alveolo-palatal fricatve] by way of palatalization, especially next to a front vowel.
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Features
Features of the voiceless domed postalveolar affricate:
- Its manner of articulation is sibilant affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the airflow entirely, then directing it through a groove in the tongue and over the sharp edge of the teeth, causing high-frequency turbulence.
- Its place of articulation is palato-alveolar, that is, domed postalveolar, which means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue bunched up ("domed") between the alveolar ridge and the palate.
- Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
- It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
- It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
- The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.
In English
An aspirated voiceless postalveolar affricate occurs in English, and it is the sound denoted by the letters 'ch' in chip.
In other languages
This sound is present as the following spellings in these languages:
- tx in Basque and Catalan
- cs in Hungarian
- ch in Spanish and Quiché
- cz in Polish
- ç in Turkish and Albanian
- ċ in Maltese
- č in Czecho-Slovak, Croatian, Slovenian, Lithuanian, and Latvian
- ĉ in Esperanto
- c followed by i or e in Italian and Romanian, as well as the church pronunciation of Latin
- ч in Bulgarian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian (but not Russian)
- چ in Persian and Urdu
- च (unaspirated) and छ (aspirated) in Sanskrit, Hindi, and other languages written in Devanagari
- চ (unaspirated) and ছ (aspirated) in Bengali
- ㅈ (unaspirated) and ㅊ (aspirated) in Korean
- ቸ in Amharic
- tch in French loans
- tsch in German loans
- č or tš in Estonian loans
The following are often mistakenly thought to be this sound: Dutch tj; Mandarin j, q, zh, or ch (in Pinyin); Russian ч; Japanese ち, and Thai จ, ฉ, ช, and ฌ. These are actually alveolo-palatal or, in the case of Pinyin zh and ch, retroflex.
See also