Voiceless velar lateral fricative

Voiceless velar lateral fricative
ʟ̝̊
Sound
source · help

The voiceless velar lateral fricative is a very rare speech sound. As one element of an affricate, it is found for example in Zulu and Xhosa (see velar lateral ejective affricate). However, a simple fricative has only been reported from a few languages in the Caucasus and New Guinea.

Archi, a Northeast Caucasian language of Dagestan, has four voiceless velar lateral fricatives: plain [ʟ̝̊], labialized [ʟ̝̊ʷ], fortis [ʟ̝̊ː], and labialized fortis [ʟ̝̊ːʷ]. Although clearly fricatives, these are further forward than velars in most languages, and might better be called prevelar. Archi also has a voiced fricative, as well as a voiceless and several ejective lateral velar affricates, but no alveolar lateral fricatives or affricates.[1]

In New Guinea, some of the Chimbu–Wahgi languages such as Melpa, Middle Wahgi, and Nii, have a voiceless velar lateral fricative, which they write with a double-bar el (Ⱡ, ⱡ). This sound also appears in syllable coda position as an allophone of the voiced velar lateral fricative in Kuman.[2]

The IPA has no separate symbol for these sounds, but they can be transcribed as a devoiced raised velar lateral approximant, ʟ̝̊ (here the devoicing ring diacritic is placed above the letter to avoid clashing with the raising diacritic). By analogy with existing IPA laterals, a small capital Ɬ is used in the extIPA:

SIL International has added these symbols to the Private Use Areas of their Gentium, Charis and Doulos fonts, at U+F268 ().

Features

Features of the voiceless velar lateral fricative:

Occurrence

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Archi лъат [ʟ̝̊at] 'sea'

References

Note: the first source uses the symbol for the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, [ɬ], but also states that the sound is prevelar.

  1. the Archi language tutorial
  2. Steed, W., & Hardie, P. (2004). Acoustic Properties of the Kuman Voiceless Velar Lateral Fricative. Proceedings of the 10th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology, Sydney.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 4/17/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.