| Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative |
| ɬ |
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| IPA number |
148 |
| Encoding |
| Entity (decimal) |
ɬ |
| Unicode (hex) |
U+026C |
| X-SAMPA |
K |
| Kirshenbaum |
s<lat> |
| Sound |
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The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar fricatives is ⟨ɬ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ⟨K⟩. The letter ⟨ɬ⟩ is called "belted l" and should not be confused with "l with tilde", ⟨ɫ⟩, which transcribes a different sound, the velarized alveolar lateral approximant. It should also be distinguished from a voiceless alveolar lateral approximant, although the fricative is sometimes incorrectly described as a "voiceless l", a description fitting only of the approximant.
[edit] Features
Features of the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative:
- Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
- Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
- 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 lateral consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream over the sides of the tongue, rather than down the middle.
- The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.
[edit] Occurrence
Although the sound is rare among European languages outside the Caucasus (being found notably in Welsh, where it is written ⟨ll⟩),[1] it is fairly common among Native American languages such as Navajo[2] and Caucasian languages such as Avar. It is also found in African languages like Zulu, Asian languages like Chukchi and Taishanese, and several Formosan languages and a number of dialects in Taiwan. Both of J.R.R. Tolkien's Welsh-inspired artificial languages, Sindarin and early Quenya, have this sound as well.
[edit] Semitic languages
The sound is conjectured as a phoneme for Proto-Semitic, usually transcribed as ś; it has evolved into Arabic [ʃ], Hebrew, [s]:
Amongst Semitic languages, the sound still exists in contemporary Soqotri[citation needed] and Mehri.[3] In Ge'ez, it is written with the letter Śawt.[citation needed]
[edit] References
- ^ Ladefoged, Peter (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 203. ISBN 0631198156.
- ^ Laver, John (1994). Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 257–258. ISBN 052145655X.
- ^ Howe, Darin (2003). Segmental Phonology. University of Calgary. p. 22.
[edit] External links
- John Wells: Beth am y llall? John Wells's phonetic blog, 1 July 2009. (How the British phonetician John Wells would teach the sound [ɬ]).
[edit] See also
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| These tables contain phonetic symbols, which may not display correctly in some browsers. [Help] |
| Where symbols appear in pairs, left—right represent the voiceless—voiced consonants. |
| Shaded areas denote pulmonic articulations judged to be impossible. |
| * Symbol not defined in IPA. |
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