Voiced pharyngeal fricative

Uncommon card · No. 130403

A voiced pharyngeal fricative or approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʕ⟩. Although the official classification of manner for this sound in the IPA is a fricative, spectrographic and acoustic studies have found that it is most often realized as an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, as no language is known to make a phonemic distinction between voiced pharyngeal fricatives and approximants. For clarity, the approximant may be distinguished with the IPA diacritic for lowering, such as ⟨ʕ̞⟩. In addition, laryngoscopic studies by phoneticians such as John Esling have shown the vowel [ɑ] to have distinct pharyngeal constriction and resonance in its articulation and quality, making [ʕ̞] the semivocalic equivalent of [ɑ]; this is reflected in the IPA's definition of the vowel's cardinal value. Esling furthers this notion in his expanded notation of the IPA chart;...

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