Voiceless epiglottal trill

The voiceless epiglottal or pharyngeal trill, or voiceless epiglottal fricative,^[1] is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʜ⟩, a small capital version of the Latin letter h, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is H\.

Voiceless pharyngeal trill (voiceless epiglottal fricative)
ʜ
IPA Number	172
Audio sample
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Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ʜ
Unicode (hex)	U+029C
X-SAMPA	H\
Braille
Image

The glyph is homoglyphic with the lowercase Cyrillic letter En (н).

Features

Features of the voiceless epiglottal trill/fricative:

• Its manner of articulation is trill, which means it is produced by directing air over an articulator so that it vibrates.
• Its place of articulation is epiglottal, which means it is articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis.
• 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.
• Its airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Agul[2]		мехӏ	[mɛʜ]	'whey'
Amis[3]		tihi	[tiʜiʔ]	'spouse'	The epiglottal consonants in Amis have proven hard to describe, with some describing it not as epiglottal, but a pharyngeal fricative or even as a uvular consonant. See Amis phonology
Arabic[4]	Iraqi[5]	حَي	[ʜaj]	'alive'	Corresponds to /ħ/ ⟨ح⟩ in Standard Arabic. See Arabic phonology
Bengali		খড়	[ʜↄɾ]	'straw'	Mainly realized as such in very eastern regions; often also debuccalized or phonetically realised as /x/. Corresponds to /kʰ/ in western and central dialects. See Bengali phonology
Chechen		хьо	[ʜʷɔ]	'you'
Dahalo			[ʜaːɗo]	'arrow'
Haida		x̱ants	[ʜʌnt͡s]	'shadow'
Somali[6]		xoor	[ʜoːɾ]	'bubble'	Realization of /ħ/ for some speakers.[6] See Somali phonology

See also

• Index of phonetics articles

Notes

1. Esling, John (2010). "Phonetic Notation". In Hardcastle; Laver; Gibbon (eds.). The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences (2nd ed.). p. 695.
2. Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:167–168)
3. Maddieson, Ian; Wright, Richard (October 1995). "The Vowels and Consonants of Amis — A Preliminary Phonetic Report" (PDF). UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics. 91: Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages III: 45–65.
4. Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:167–168)
5. Hassan, Zeki; Esling, John; Moisik, Scott; Crevier-Buchman, Lise (2011). "Aryepiglottic trilled variants of /ʕ, ħ/ in Iraqi Arabic" (PDF). Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. pp. 831–834. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-03-19.
6. Gabbard, Kevin M. (2010). A Phonological Analysis of Somali and the Guttural Consonants (PDF) (BA thesis). Ohio State University. p. 14.

References

• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.

External links

• List of languages with [ʜ] on PHOIBLE