Voiceless glottal fricative

From FrathWiki
Revision as of 15:06, 14 August 2008 by Blackkdark (talk | contribs) (New page: This is a standard voiceless glottal fricative. It is also comparable to a devoiced vowel. The symbol is /h/. In Romance languages that do not pronounce this sound, and English, the let...)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigationJump to search

This is a standard voiceless glottal fricative. It is also comparable to a devoiced vowel. The symbol is /h/. In Romance languages that do not pronounce this sound, and English, the letter's name is usually pronounced with a palatal or velar sound (Spanish /aʧe/, French /aʃ/, Italian /aka/, Portuguese /aga/, English /eʧ/). In Germanic languages, the name is usually pronounced /ha/.

Germanic languages

English

In all stages of English, the letter h in the initial position (in a syllable of Modern English, though most of the time /h/ comes at the beginning of a word, notable exception is behind). In Anglo-Saxon, an h after a vowel would be /x/ or /ç/ depending on the location of the vowel. The symbol h is used in many digraphs without the /h/ pronunciation, such as ch /ʧ/, th /ð/ or /θ/, rh /ɹ/, ph /f/, sh /ʃ/, wh /ʍ/, and hn /n̯/, hr /ɹ̯/, and hl /ɬ/ (the last threeare from Old and Middle English).

Other West Germanic Languages

High German, Dutch, and Low German also commonly use the symbol h to represent the sound /h/, which is also fairly common in the language.

Old Norse and Icelandic

The symbol h was/is used to mark devoiced versions of normally voiced sounds (like in Anglo-Saxon). Otherwise it is used to represent the normal /h/.

Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish

These three use the same symbol to represent this sound.

Romance Languages

Latin and Romanian

Latin and Romanian did/do have the letter h, which it was/is pronounced /h/, like most Germanic languages.

Spanish

Spanish does not naturally have the sound /h/, but in some dialects in Central and South America, the sound /h/ is used for the letter j. NOTE: This is only a few dialects, it is more standard to pronounce j as /x/ after back vowels, and /ç/ elsewhere!

French

In Normandy, which was occupied by the Norman (Viking) peoples, they brought the /h/ sound with them into Old Norman French. Even today, the Norman French language is spoken with a /h/ sound.

Hebrew and Arabic

Ancient Egyptian

Hawai'ian

Turkish