Voiceless palatal plosive
The
voiceless palatal plosive is a type of
consonantal sound used in some
spoken languages. The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent
X-SAMPA symbol is
c.
Hungarian is one of the few languages with true palatal plosives. More commonly, the symbol is used to represent a
voiceless postalveolar affricate, for example in the
Indic languages. This may be considered appropriate when the place of articulation needs to be specified, but the distinction between stop and affricate is not contrastive, and therefore of secondary importance.
Features of the voiceless palatal plosive:
* Its
manner of articulation is
plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. However, there is a tendency for this sound to become a
voiceless postalveolar affricate.
* Its
place of articulation is
palatal which means it is articulated with the middle or back part of the
tongue raised against the
hard 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.
*
ky [c],
khy, and
gy in the
Lhasa dialect of
Tibetan*
q in
Albanian*
ť in
Czech and
Slovak; it is also pronounced in
ti [],
tí [], and in Czech
tě and Slovak
te - both pronounced as []
*
ty in
Hungarian (see
Hungarian ty)
*
ķ in
Latvian*It occurs also in
Greek as an allophone of [] before [] or [].
*
tj in some
Limburgian dialects, e.g.
Roermond and
Weert dialects
*
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