Tenuis consonant
| Tenuis | |
|---|---|
| ◌˭ | |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | ˭ |
| Unicode (hex) | U+02ED |
|
|
|
| Voice onset time |
|---|
| + Aspirated |
| 0 Tenuis |
| − Voiced |
In linguistics, a tenuis consonant (
/ˈtɛnjuː.ɨs/) is a stop or affricate which is unvoiced, unaspirated, and unglottalized. That is, it has a "plain" phonation like [p, t, ts, tʃ, k], with a voice onset time close to zero, as in Spanish p, t, ch, k, or as in English p, t, k after s (spy, sty, sky).
In transcription, tenuis consonants are not normally marked explicitly, with voiceless IPA letters such as ⟨p, t, ts, tʃ, k⟩ assumed to be unaspirated unless indicated otherwise. However, there is an explicit diacritic for a lack of aspiration in the Extensions to the IPA, the superscript equal sign: ⟨p˭, t˭, ts˭, tʃ˭, k˭⟩.
The term tenuis comes from Latin translations of Ancient Greek grammar, which differentiated three series of consonants, voiced β δ γ /b d ɡ/, aspirate φ θ χ /pʰ tʰ kʰ/, and tenuis π τ κ /p˭ t˭ k˭/; these series have close parallels in other Indo-European languages, such as Armenian.
In Unicode, the symbol is encoded at U+02ED ˭ modifier letter unaspirated (HTML: ˭ ).
[edit] References
- Bussmann, 1996. Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
[edit] See also
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