Voiced epiglottal fricative

Common card · No. 366436

A voiced epiglottal fricative, or voiced pharyngeal trill, is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʢ⟩. Although the official name in the IPA for this sound has always been a voiced epiglottal fricative since it was introduced in 1989, laryngoscopic studies by John Esling have found that both epiglottal and pharyngeal consonants are pharyngeal in place of articulation, and are affected in manner by the aryepiglottic folds and larynx height; he therefore proposed the reclassification of ⟨ʢ⟩ as the trilled counterpart of ⟨ʕ⟩, noting both as ranging from fricatives to approximants, and later described realizations of ⟨ʢ⟩ ranging from a fricative, to a trill, to a fricative trill. Esling furthered this reclassification with a modified version of the IPA chart, merging pharyngeal and epiglottal consonants into a single column, placing ⟨ʢ⟩ as a trill, ⟨ʕ⟩ as a fricative, and ⟨ʕ̞⟩ as an approximant...

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