In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, a tenuis consonant ( or ) is an
obstruent that is
voiceless,
unaspirated and
unglottalized.
In other words, it has the "plain"
phonation
The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defi ...
of with a
voice onset time
In phonetics, voice onset time (VOT) is a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time that passes between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, the vibration of the vocal folds, or, accor ...
close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as
Spanish ''p, t, ch, k'' or
English ''p, t, k'' after ''s'' (''spy, sty, sky'').
For most languages, the distinction is relevant only for
stops and
affricates. However, a few languages have analogous series for
fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
s.
Mazahua, for example, has ejective, aspirated, and voiced fricatives alongside tenuis , parallel to stops alongside tenuis .
Many
click languages have tenuis click consonants alongside voiced, aspirated, and glottalized series.
Transcription
In transcription, tenuis consonants are not normally marked explicitly, and consonants written with voiceless
IPA letters, such as , are typically assumed to be unaspirated and unglottalized unless otherwise indicated. However, aspiration is often left untranscribed if no contrast needs to be made, like in English, so there is an explicit diacritic for a lack of aspiration in the
extensions to the IPA, a superscript equal sign: . It is sometimes seen in phonetic descriptions of languages.
There are also languages, such as the
Northern Ryukyuan languages
The Northern Ryukyuan languages, also known as the Amami–Okinawan languages, are a group of languages spoken in the Amami Islands, Kagoshima Prefecture and the Okinawa Islands, Okinawa Prefecture of southwestern Japan. It is one of two primary ...
, whose phonologically-
unmarked sound is aspirated, and the tenuis consonants are marked and transcribed explicitly.
In
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
, the symbol is encoded at .
An early IPA convention was to write the tenuis stops etc. if the plain letters were used for aspirated consonants (as they are in English): 'pie' vs. 'spy'.
Etymology
The term ''tenuis'' comes from Latin translations of
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...
grammar, which differentiated three series of consonants, voiced , aspirate , and tenuis . Analogous series occur in many other languages. The term was widely used in 19th-century philology but became uncommon in the 20th.
See also
*
Grassmann's law
*
Spiritus asper
*
Spiritus lenis
Sources
* Bussmann, 1996. ''Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics''
* R.L. Trask, 1996. ''A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tenuis Consonant
Phonetics