voiceless alveolar affricate

Information about voiceless alveolar affricate

The voiceless alveolar affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is t͡s (previously ʦ), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ts. The voiceless alveolar affricate occurs in such languages as German, Esperanto, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, among many others.

IPA – number	103 (132)
IPA – text	t͡s
IPA – image
Entity	ʦ
X-SAMPA	`ts`
Kirshenbaum	`ts`
Sound sample (helpinfo)

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolar affricate:

Its manner of articulation is sibilant affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the airflow entirely, then directing it through a groove in the tongue and over the sharp edge of the teeth, causing high-frequency turbulence.
Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the center of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

In English

This sound is not an English phoneme. Loanwords that begin with this sound in their original language, such as tsunami or tsar, are often pronounced with just the fricative aspect (i.e. as sunami and sar respectively). Words like cats and pizza exhibit the consonant cluster /ts/, which is very similar phonetically, but can differ on morphological (/kæt+s/) and phonemic (/piːt.sə/) grounds.

Other languages

Voiceless alveolar affricate occurs in:

Abkhaz: хьаца [χaˈt͡sa] "hornbeam"
Ainu: チュク [t͡suk̚] "autumn"
Albanian: cimbidh [t͡simbiğ] "tongs"
Cherokee: ᏣᎳᎩ [t͡salagi] "Cherokee"
Croatian: cilj [t͡si:ʎ] "target, goal"
Czech: co [t͡so] "what"
Esperanto: ceceo [t͡seˈt͡seo] "tsetse fly"
Quebec French: petit [pəˈt͡si] "small"
Georgian: კაცი [kʼat͡sʰi] "man"
German: zehn [t͡se:n] "ten"
Greek: κορίτσι [ko̞ˈrit͡si] "girl"
Modern Hebrew: צבע [ˈt͡seva] "color"
Hungarian: cica [ˈt͡sit͡sa] "kitten"
Italian: grazia [ˈgrat͡sja] "grace"
Kabardian: цы [t͡sʰɪ] "hair"
Kabyle: iḥeşşeḇ [iħət͡st͡səβ], "he counts"
Kiowa: cé^. [t͡séː] "short"
Korean:'지진' in ㅈ [ʣiʣin] "earthquake"
Latvian: cik [t͡sik] "how many"
Pashto: څلور [t͡saˈlor] "four"
Polish: cebula [t͡sɛˈbula] "onion"
Romanian: preţ [pret͡s] "price"
Russian: царь [t͡sarʲ] "Czar"
Tanacross: dzeen [t͡seːn] "day"
Does not exist in stardard Azeri but in some Western dialects replaces /tʃ/ (written as ç) and/or /c/ (written as k).

Consonants (List, table)

The term

The term sibilant is often taken to be synonymous with the term strident
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Affricate consonants begin as stops (most often an alveolar, such as [t] or [d]) but release as a fricative (such as [s]
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turbulence or turbulent flow is a flow regime characterized by chaotic, stochastic property changes. This includes low momentum diffusion, high momentum convection, and rapid variation of pressure and velocity in space and time.
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place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is the point of contact, where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an active (moving) articulator (typically some part of the tongue) and a passive (stationary) articulator (typically some part of
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Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the superior teeth.
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An alveolar ridge (also known as the alveolar margin) is one of the two jaw ridges either on the roof of the mouth between the upper teeth and the hard palate or on the bottom of the mouth behind the lower teeth. The alveolar ridges contain the sockets (alveoli) of the teeth.
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An apical consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the apex of the tongue (i.e. the tip of the tongue). This contrasts with laminal consonants, which are produced by creating an obstruction with the blade of the tongue (which is just behind
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A laminal consonant is a phone produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, which is the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue.
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In phonetics, phonation is the "use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i.e., sound, which can then be modified by the articulatory actions of the rest of the vocal apparatus.
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An oral consonant is a consonant sound in speech that is made by allowing air to escape from the mouth. To create an intended oral consonant sound, the entire mouth plays a role in modifying the air's passageway.
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A central or medial consonant is a consonant sound that is produced when air flows across the center of the mouth over the tongue.

Examples of central consonants are the voiceless velar plosive (the "k" in the English word "skin"), the voiced alveolar fricative (the
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In phonetics, initiation is the action by which an air-flow is created through the vocal tract. Along with articulation, it is one of the two mandatory aspects of sound production: without initiation, there is no sound.
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In human speech, pulmonic egressive sounds are those in which the air stream is created by the lungs (pulmonic) exhaling and pushing air out (egressive) through the mouth or nose. The majority of sounds in most languages are both pulmonic and egressive.
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lungs flank the heart and great vessels in the chest cavity.^[1]]]

The lung is the essential respiration organ in air-breathing vertebrates, the most primitive being the lungfish.
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The space between the vocal cords is called the glottis.

Function

As the vocal cords vibrate, the resulting vibration produces a "buzzing" quality to the speech, called voice or voicing.
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