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Voiceless alveolo palatal affricate

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IPA number
  
215

Unicode (hex)
  
U+02A8

Entity (decimal)
  
ʨ

X-SAMPA
  
t_s or c_s

Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate

The voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are ⟨t͡ɕ⟩, ⟨t͜ɕ⟩, ⟨c͡ɕ⟩ and ⟨c͜ɕ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are t_s and c_s, though transcribing the stop component with ⟨c⟩ (c in X-SAMPA) is rare. The tie bar is sometimes omitted, yielding ⟨tɕ⟩ or ⟨cɕ⟩ in the IPA and ts or cs in X-SAMPA. This is potentially problematic in case of at least some affricates, because there are languages that contrast certain affricates with stop-fricative sequences. Polish words czysta ('clean (f.)', pronounced with an affricate /t͡ʂ/) and trzysta ('three hundred', pronounced with a sequence /tʂ/) are an example of a minimal pair based on such a contrast.

Neither [t] nor [c] are a completely narrow transcription of the stop component, which can be narrowly transcribed as [t̠ʲ] (retracted and palatalized [t]) or [c̟] (advanced [c]). The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are t_-' or t_-_j and c_+, respectively.

This affricate used to have a dedicated symbol ⟨ʨ⟩, which was one of the six dedicated symbols for affricates in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It occurs in languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Russian, and is the sibilant equivalent of voiceless palatal affricate.

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate:

  • Its manner of articulation is sibilant affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the air flow entirely, then directing it with the tongue to the sharp edge of the teeth, causing high-frequency turbulence.
  • Its place of articulation is alveolo-palatal. This means that:
  • Its place of articulation is postalveolar, meaning that the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth in the area behind the alveolar ridge (the gum line).
  • Its tongue shape is laminal, meaning that it is the tongue blade that contacts the roof of the mouth.
  • It is heavily palatalized, meaning that the middle of the tongue is bowed and raised towards the hard palate.
  • 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.
  • The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

    • References

    Voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA