Everything about Pharyngeal Consonant totally explained
A
pharyngeal consonant is a type of
consonant which is articulated with the root of the
tongue against the
pharynx.
Pharyngeal consonants in the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA):
- Pharyngeal plosives are thought to be impossible. Note that when they're posited, they're sometimes transcribed with a small capital Q, [Q].
- Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, [ʕ] is usually an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language has a distinct fricative and approximant at this place of articulation. Sometimes the lowering diacritic is used to specify that the manner is approximant: [ʕ̞].
Pharyngeals are known primarily from two areas of the world: in North-Africa/Mideast (in the
Semitic,
Berber,
Cushitic,
Circassian, and
Dagestanian families) and in British Columbia (in the
Wakashan and
Salish families). There are scattered reports of pharyngeals elsewhere, such as in the Nilo-Saharan
Tama language and in
Nenets in Northern Russia. In
Finnish, a weak pharyngeal fricative is the realization of /h/ next to the vowel /a/, but since this is mere
allophony, it's transcribed as /h/. According to the
laryngeal theory, the
Proto-Indo-European language might also have contained pharyngeal consonants.
Note that reported pharyngeals frequently turn out to be
epiglottals. Such was the case for
Dahalo and northern
Haida, for example, and is likely to be true for many if not most of the others. This is perhaps because 'epiglottal' was only recently recognized as a distinct place of articulation, rather than a variant of 'pharyngeal'. The only language known to have contrastive pharyngeals and epiglottals is
Agul, a
Lezgian language of Dagestan.
Recently, a possible new place of articulation,
epiglotto-pharyngeal, was reported.
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