The voiceless velar fricative is a type of

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...

al sound used in some spoken

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

s. It was part of the consonant inventory of

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...

and can still be found in some dialects of

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

, most notably in

Scottish English Scottish English ( gd, Beurla Albannach) is the set of varieties of the English language spoken in Scotland. The transregional, standardised variety is called Scottish Standard English or Standard Scottish English (SSE). Scottish Standa ...

, e.g. in ''loch'', ''broch'' or ''saugh'' (willow). The symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

that represents this sound is , the Latin letter x. It is also used in

broad transcription Phonetic transcription (also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phones'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the ...

instead of the symbol , the Greek chi, for the voiceless uvular fricative. There is also a voiceless post-velar fricative (also called pre-uvular) in some languages, which can be transcribed as ̠or �̟ For voiceless pre-velar fricative (also called post-palatal), see voiceless palatal fricative.

Features

Features of the voiceless velar fricative:

Varieties

Occurrence

The voiceless velar fricative and its labialized variety are postulated to have occurred in

Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic br ...

, the ancestor of the

Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...

, as the reflex of the

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...

voiceless palatal and velar stops and the labialized voiceless velar stop. Thus Proto-Indo-European *ḱr̥nom "horn" and *kʷód "what" became Proto-Germanic *hurnan and *hwat, where *h and *hw were likely and . This sound change is part of Grimm's law. In

Modern Greek Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...

, the voiceless velar fricative (with its

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

the voiceless palatal fricative , occurring before front vowels) originated from the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...

voiceless aspirated stop in a sound change that lenited Greek aspirated stops into fricatives.

Notes

References

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External links